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Xavier Bennet

Resume

Xavier Bennet

Senior IT Operations Leader

Sydney, Australia · Bennet.rk@gmail.com

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Profile

14+ years leading major incident, crisis and 24x7 command-centre operations across telecommunications, SaaS and critical infrastructure.

I coordinate high-impact incidents, brief C-level leaders when the event is nationally significant, and build the controls, automation and post-incident discipline that stop the same failure happening twice.

Experience

  • Workday

    May 2024 — Present

    Service Manager, Global · North Sydney

    NASDAQ: WDAY · Fortune 500 SaaS

    Global P1/P2 governance, APAC crisis lead, and AIOps on a platform used by more than half of the Fortune 500.

    • Owned end-to-end major-incident restoration across engineering, vendors and the business, including executive-only bridges for a high-priority security vulnerability.
    • Owned problem management end to end — intake, trend analysis, RCA quality, known-error records, and follow-through with engineering and vendors until the action actually closed.
    • Ran service management end to end: service reviews, action tracking, and owners with dates so outstanding work was visible and closed, not parked in a slide.

  • Tabcorp

    Feb 2023 — Apr 2024

    Major Incident and Problem Manager · Sydney

    ASX: TAH · Wagering & gaming

    Incident, problem and change for Australia’s largest wagering operator, under multi-state regulatory oversight.

    • Reduced problem tickets 56% (97 → 42) in eleven months through trend analysis and vendor risk acceptance.
    • CAB lead for the weekly operations change call; cut change lead times 27% and ended restore-order disputes mid-outage.
    • Closed the regulatory reporting backlog by opening a working channel with each state authority.

  • Macquarie Technology

    Jun 2021 — Jan 2023

    Major Incident and Problem Manager · Sydney

    ASX: MAQ · Cloud, data centre, cyber, telco

    Major incident ownership across cloud and data-centre estates, including events that hit up to 200 SME customers.

    • Introduced a fatigue rule on the 24x7 command centre: engineer swap after six hours on a critical, so the bridge gets a fresh mind instead of a spent one.
    • Used post-incident metrics to expose a vendor service flaw, renegotiated the contract, and drove 12% cost savings.
    • Ran monthly customer and vendor SLA reviews with an action tracker that made outstanding issues visible.

  • Nokia

    Jun 2018 — May 2021

    Service Delivery Manager — Incident, Problem & Change · Sydney

    Optus and Vodafone contracts

    Onshore owner for offshore incident, problem and change teams in India and the Philippines, plus crisis work for two mobile network contracts.

    • Led joint Optus–Vodafone resource sharing on JV sites during natural disasters — faster restore, lower cost.
    • Trained the offshore major-incident team; the group took a quarterly performance award. Built macros so tier-1 could recognise a major without waiting for onshore.
    • Designed and trained a Python disaster-management tool that improved site-list accuracy by up to 17%. Bushfires, Christmas traffic, iPhone launch — RFS and telco authorities on the same plan.

  • Optus

    Dec 2012 — May 2018

    Incident Controller / Duty Manager · Macquarie Park, Sydney

    Singtel Group · National mobile & fixed

    24x7 NOC shift lead for ~40 engineers. Central authority on major outages, then the promotion into that seat.

    • Coordinated recovery of a major that impacted ~60% of the national network; full service in 40 minutes.
    • Led bushfire response on critical network infrastructure with onshore, offshore and field teams, TIO and emergency services, plus executive and ministerial briefings.
    • Promoted from incident commander to NOC shift lead in two years. Recognised for back-to-back high-severity bridges lasting 14+ hours. Stood up a structured CAB that earned C-level recognition.

Key achievements

  • Sixty percent of a national network

    Optus · NOC shift lead for ~40 engineers. Full service restored in 40 minutes.

  • Eight minutes to two

    Workday · Agentic incident comms on Gemini, PagerDuty and Slack — plus a Claude runbook agent.

  • Ninety-seven problems down to forty-two

    Tabcorp · 56% fewer problem tickets in eleven months, under multi-state wagering regulation.

Capabilities

  • Major incident command

    End-to-end ownership of P1/P2 restoration: engineering, vendors, executives, and the clock. I have run 24x7 NOC shifts of ~40 engineers and global SaaS bridges in the same week of a career.

  • Crisis and disaster response

    Bushfires, national network events, Christmas traffic, iPhone launches. Onshore, offshore and field teams, plus agencies — TIO, RFS, emergency services — and ministerial briefings when the impact is public.

  • AIOps that actually ships

    Not a Copilot tab. Agentic workflows on Gemini, Claude, PagerDuty and Slack that cut broadcast time from eight minutes to two, parse MTTD/MTTI/MTTR, and walk a team through the runbook for the thing that is actually down.

  • Problem and PIR discipline

    Root cause, known-error database, trend analysis, and post-incident reviews that executives will sit through. Recurring noise gets named, owned, and reduced — not parked in a ticket pile.

  • Multi-vendor governance

    SLAs, service reviews, action trackers, and the nerve to renegotiate when post-incident data shows the vendor is the weak link. Telecom, data centre, cloud and wagering suppliers included.

  • C-level and regulatory rooms

    Clear, timed communication under pressure — Fortune 500 SaaS, ASX operators, and state wagering regulators. Confidentiality when the incident is a security vulnerability. Evidence when the government asks.

Tools

PagerDuty · Jira · ServiceNow · Slack · Google Gemini · Claude · Cursor

Education & certifications

Master of Engineering

Telecommunication Engineering · University of Technology Sydney

Contact

Bennet.rk@gmail.com · www.xavierbennet.com