oncallressourcer

The oncallressourcer is a role in IT operations and service management responsible for organizing and maintaining on-call coverage for critical systems. The term is not widely standardized and is often a company-specific title that combines on-call responsibilities with resource management.

Core responsibilities include creating and maintaining on-call schedules, coordinating shift handoffs, defining escalation policies, and ensuring effective handover of incidents between teams. The oncallressourcer also maintains and updates runbooks, monitoring dashboards, and incident response procedures; tracks coverage levels, call-out rates, and burnout risk; and manages vacations, holidays, and surge capacity to preserve service availability.

They work closely with engineering, support, and HR teams to ensure appropriate staffing, skill coverage, and cross-team collaboration. They may also be responsible for optimizing rotations for fairness and efficiency, documenting exceptions, and handling escalations when coverage gaps occur.

Tools commonly used include scheduling software, incident management platforms (such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie), chat and collaboration apps, and version-controlled runbooks. They may also analyze metrics on SLA adherence, mean time to respond, and incident recurrence to inform adjustments to rotations and processes.

In practice, duties and authority vary by organization. In smaller teams, scheduling and staffing may be handled by SREs or DevOps engineers rather than a dedicated oncallressourcer. In larger organizations, explicit governance around on-call coverage is more likely to be formalized within a resource-management function. See also On-call, Incident management, SRE, Shift rotation.