What are the responsibilities and job description for the Service Desk Analyst position at Paladin Consulting?
Job Title: IT Service Desk Analyst (Mainframe Operations & Customer Support)
Work Location: Downtown Fort Worth, TX (onsite)
Duration: Contract-to-hire (eligible to hire at 6 months)
Schedule: Must be flexible — this is a 24x7x365 operations environment (rotating shifts, nights, weekends, and holiday coverage as assigned)
Position Summary:
- The IT Service Desk Analyst serves as the front line of IT support for both internal employees and external customers, resolving incidents and service requests quickly and with a high degree of customer care.
- This role sits on the IT Service Delivery team and reports to the IT Service Delivery Manager, executing the day-to-day L1 triage, incident intake, and operations monitoring that keep business-critical systems available around the clock.
- A core responsibility of this role is supporting the company's mainframe-based order and invoicing system — monitoring jobs, responding to processing issues, and escalating appropriately so that order flow and billing are never interrupted.
- The ideal candidate combines strong first-level service desk fundamentals (M365, identity and password administration, ticket handling) with hands-on mainframe operations exposure, and thrives in a fast-moving, always-on support environment.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as the first point of contact for all IT incidents and service requests from internal and external customers via phone, email, and ticket queue.
- Perform L1 triage: capture, categorize, prioritize, and document every incident accurately in Jira Service Management (JSM), escalating to L2/L3 or vendor support when resolution exceeds L1 scope.
- Support and troubleshoot Microsoft 365 (Outlook/Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive), Windows desktops, VPN/remote access, and standard enterprise applications.
- Administer identity and access requests — password resets, account unlocks, MFA enrollment, provisioning and deprovisioning — in line with established security standards.
- Monitor mainframe operations supporting the order and invoicing system: watch batch job execution, respond to job failures and abends, run reruns/restarts per documented procedures, and monitor output and print/distribution processes.
- Support external customer-facing order and invoicing issues, researching transaction and processing errors and coordinating resolution with business and technical stakeholders.
- Execute operations monitoring across servers, networks, and enterprise systems, acting on alerts and events per documented runbooks and escalation paths.
- Meet or exceed defined service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction.
- Follow ITIL-based incident, problem, and change management processes, contributing quality documentation that supports root cause analysis and problem management.
- Participate in the lifecycle of critical incidents — providing timely status updates, engaging the right resources, and supporting after-action review.
- Create, maintain, and improve knowledge base articles, runbooks, and standard operating procedures to increase first-contact resolution and shift-to-shift consistency.
- Support hardware and software provisioning, imaging, and asset tracking against enterprise standards.
- Identify recurring issues and process gaps, and surface improvement recommendations to the IT Service Delivery Manager.
- Deliver clean, complete shift handoffs in a 24x7x365 rotation so that in-flight issues are never dropped.
Skills & Qualifications:
- 3 years of experience in an IT service desk, help desk, or IT operations role supporting both internal and external customers.
- 3 years of hands-on first-level support experience with Microsoft 365, Active Directory / Entra ID (password resets, account administration, MFA), and Windows desktop troubleshooting.
- Mainframe operations experience required — job/batch monitoring, abend response, rerun/restart procedures, and console operations (z/OS, JCL, JES, and job scheduling tooling such as Control-M or CA-7 are a plus).
- Experience supporting an order management, invoicing, or billing application, ideally one running on a mainframe platform.
- Experience with ITSM ticketing tools; Jira Service Management (JSM) strongly preferred.
- Working knowledge of ITIL/ITSM concepts — incident, problem, and change management — and of operating to defined SLAs and KPIs.
- Familiarity with operations monitoring and alerting tools, and comfort acting on alerts using documented runbooks.
- Exceptional customer service and communication skills, with the ability to explain technical issues clearly to non-technical internal and external customers.
- Strong problem-solving skills, sound judgment on when to escalate, and disciplined ticket documentation habits.
- Ability to manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment while maintaining attention to detail.
- Must be available to work a flexible schedule in a 24x7x365 environment, including nights, weekends, holidays, and on-call rotation as needed.
- ITIL Foundation certification preferred.