Operations

The work nobody celebrates but everyone notices the second it stops. Vendor monitoring, incident response, inventory, capacity, on-call hygiene. The plumbing that quietly keeps a business running.

What people build here

Vendor SLA monitor. Agent watches each vendor's status page and their uptime against the contract you signed. When something slips, it opens a ticket, pings the owner, drafts the credit request.
Inventory and reorder. Watches stock against lead times. When a SKU drops below its reorder point, the agent drafts the PO and routes it to whoever signs off, with all the context attached.
On-call balancer. Looks at the next month of rotations, flags uneven loads and vacation clashes, suggests swaps, and messages the people involved to confirm.
Overnight digest. Every morning, a rollup of what happened while you were asleep across Slack, your ticket system, deploys, and customer signals. One message: "here's what needs your attention today."
Incident running. When something breaks, the agent posts the incident, keeps the status page updated as new info comes in, and drafts the postmortem from the timeline once it's resolved.
Renewal and contract tracking. Watches vendor renewal dates, flags upcoming negotiations 60 / 30 / 7 days out, and pulls the usage data you'll use to push for better terms.
Compliance sweeps. Recurring checks that every employee has the latest policy signed, every vendor has a current DPA, every shared doc has an owner. Reports the gaps without lecturing about them.

How to ask for one

Every morning at 7 AM, check status.pagerduty.com, status.stripe.com, and status.cloudflare.com. If any vendor is in "degraded" or "outage" for more than 10 minutes, post a Slack message to #ops with the vendor, the affected services, and a link.

Connections you'll usually want

Whatever ops tools you live in: your ticketing system (Linear, Jira), Slack or Teams, the status pages that matter to you, your accounting or procurement tool, and any vendor portals where the data actually lives.