Service Desk Manager

Job Title: Service Desk Manager


Location: Studio City, California (Onsite)


Role Overview:

Base8 is seeking an experienced and proactive Service Desk Manager to lead our Studio City, California service desk operations. In this onsite, full-time role you will serve as the critical operational bridge between our India-based Service Desk team and US-based project teams, ensuring seamless IT support delivery, rigorous adherence to service-level commitments, and strong cross-functional alignment with business objectives.


You will be the face of IT service quality for our US operations - owning the incident lifecycle from first contact through root-cause closure, shaping the day-to-day experience of every end user who reaches out for support, and continuously improving the processes, tools, and talent that make the service desk run. This is a hands-on leadership role that demands both strategic thinking and a willingness to roll up your sleeves.


Key Responsibilities:

Service Desk Leadership

• Direct and oversee all day-to-day service desk operations supporting US-based users, setting clear performance expectations and holding the team accountable to SLA, KPI, and quality benchmarks.

• Act as the primary escalation point for P1/P2 critical incidents and major service disruptions; make real-time decisions about resource allocation, communication cadence, and executive notification.

• Conduct regular queue reviews to identify bottlenecks, ticket aging risks, and workload imbalances, intervening proactively to keep resolution times on target.

• Produce and present weekly and monthly service desk performance reports to US leadership, translating raw metrics into clear business-impact narratives and improvement recommendations.

Global Team Coordination

• Partner with the India-based Service Desk leadership to design and enforce shift-handoff protocols that eliminate information loss and ensure true 24/7 support coverage.

• Standardize ticket-handling procedures, escalation paths, knowledge-base articles, and runbooks across global teams so that any agent, anywhere, can deliver a consistent user experience.

• Chair regular governance and performance-review meetings with offshore counterparts, tracking action items, surfacing risks, and celebrating wins.

• Serve as a cultural liaison, building trust and rapport across time zones and fostering a one-team mindset despite geographic distance.

Stakeholder & Client Management

• Embed yourself in US project teams during new initiative launches and technology transitions, ensuring support readiness - trained staff, documented runbooks, and agreed SLAs - before go-live.

• Translate complex technical service issues into plain-language business communications for non-technical stakeholders, maintaining confidence and transparency at all times.

• Build and maintain a stakeholder feedback loop, gathering satisfaction data, acting on themes, and closing the loop with demonstrable service improvements.

Incident & Problem Management

• Own the full incident lifecycle - detection, triage, assignment, resolution, and post-incident review - ensuring every step meets documented procedures and contractual commitments.

• Lead structured root-cause analysis (RCA) sessions for recurring and high-impact incidents, driving corrective and preventive actions through to verified closure.

• Maintain an accurate and up-to-date known-error database (KEDB) and knowledge base so frontline agents can resolve repeat issues faster and with greater consistency.

• Identify patterns of systemic failure and own the formal problem record through investigation, workaround development, and permanent fix delivery.

Process Improvement & Tooling

• Continuously audit service desk workflows to remove waste, reduce manual effort, and improve first-call resolution rates and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

• Champion ITIL best practices across the team, ensuring service management disciplines - change, release, configuration, and capacity management - are respected and integrated into daily operations.

• Identify and lead automation initiatives - from chatbot deflection to auto-remediation scripts - that reduce ticket volume and free agents for higher-value work.

• Evaluate, procure, and configure ITSM tooling enhancements in partnership with the infrastructure and engineering teams.

Team Development & Culture

• Recruit, onboard, mentor, and develop onsite service desk staff, setting clear individual performance goals and conducting formal reviews in compliance with California employment law.

• Design and maintain a structured training curriculum covering technical skills, soft skills, and product knowledge, keeping the team current as technology and client needs evolve.

• Recognize and reward high performance; address performance gaps through a documented, fair, and legally compliant coaching and progressive-discipline process.

• Cultivate a team culture grounded in accountability, psychological safety, continuous learning, and genuine care for the end-user experience.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field - or equivalent combination of education and directly relevant work experience.

• 5+ years of progressive experience in IT service desk or technical support environments, with demonstrable growth in scope and responsibility.

• 2+ years in a formal leadership or management role, including direct people-management responsibilities such as hiring, performance reviews, and coaching.

• Proven track record managing distributed or globally dispersed teams, with sensitivity to cross-cultural communication challenges and time-zone complexity.

• Hands-on proficiency with one or more enterprise ITSM platforms (e.g., HaloPSA, Connectwise, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, Freshservice).

• Solid working knowledge of ITIL v3 or v4 service management processes and their practical application in a managed-services or enterprise support context.

• Strong analytical skills with the ability to build, interpret, and present service performance dashboards and trend analyses.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL Foundation certification or higher; HDI Support Center Manager (HDI-SCM) or similar credential is a plus.

• Experience operating within a global delivery model, specifically coordinating with India-based delivery teams in a follow-the-sun coverage model.

• Exposure to IT project transitions, managed services onboarding, and service-readiness activities.

• Familiarity with scripting or automation tools (e.g., PowerShell, Python, or workflow automation platforms) as applied to service desk operations.

• Experience designing or optimizing self-service portals and AI-assisted ticket deflection capabilities.

Key Competencies

• Exceptional written and verbal communication - equally comfortable briefing a CIO and coaching a frontline agent.

• Sound judgment under pressure, with the decisiveness to act quickly and the discipline to document and learn afterward.

• Customer-centric mindset that treats every end-user interaction as an opportunity to build or erode organizational trust.

• Organizational agility: able to manage competing priorities, shifting deadlines, and ambiguous situations without losing focus on outcomes.

• Coaching and feedback orientation: you invest in people's growth because you understand that team capability is the ultimate service desk performance lever.

Success Metrics


Performance in this role will be evaluated against the following indicators, reviewed quarterly:

• SLA compliance rate across P1-P4 incident categories

• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) trends, by priority and category

• End-user satisfaction (CSAT) scores and response rates

• First-call / first-contact resolution (FCR) rate

• Recurring incident rate (a measure of problem management effectiveness)

• Knowledge-base article utilization and self-service deflection rate

• Team retention, development milestone completion, and engagement indicators

• On-time delivery of service improvement initiatives

Work Schedule & Environment


This is a full-time, onsite position based at Base8.io's Studio City, California office. The standard work schedule is Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM Pacific Time, with a one-hour unpaid meal break in compliance with California Labor Code § 512.


Due to the global nature of this role, occasional early-morning or evening calls with the India-based team may be required. These instances will be communicated in advance wherever operationally possible. On-call responsibilities for major incident response may apply and will be governed by a separate on-call policy compliant with California law.


California rest-period entitlements: employees receive a paid 10-minute rest break for every four hours worked (or major fraction thereof), in accordance with California IWC Wage Order requirements.


Equal Employment Opportunity


Base8.io is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, military or veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, California state, or local law. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.


Applicants with disabilities may request reasonable accommodations at any stage of the application or employment process.

How to Apply


Submit your resume and a brief cover letter outlining your service desk leadership experience and your approach to managing global teams to View email address on click.appcast.io. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We look forward to hearing from you.