Service Operations Manager

Description :

Core Responsibilities :

Platform Strategy & Governance :

- Manage the UK and Swiss Firms platform portfolio-cloud and on-prem (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)-covering service health, security posture, lifecycle, change and compliance.

- Define and maintain the platform operating model, including SLOs/SLAs/KPIs, error budgets, on-call approach and reporting.

- Ensure the continued adherence to technology standards and design guardrails within Platform Engineering (landing zones, regions, tagging, backup/DR tiers).

- Contribute to and coordinate the move from on-prem to the target cloud platform in partnership with the transformation team.

Reliability Operations & Service Management :

- Coordinate major-incident response and drive problem resolution activities, ensuring PIR actions are completed and recurrences prevented.

- Ensure observability tooling and practices are consistently applied and support the adoption of AIOps for early detection and automated remediation.

- Govern change, release and service-acceptance processes, ensuring every new service or feature transitions cleanly into BAU operations.

Platform Engineering & Delivery Enablement :

- Manage and prioritise Platform/DevOps intake, backlogs and sequencing across teams and service owners.

- Improve CI/CD and deployment practices by removing bottlenecks, supporting progressive delivery/feature flagging, and standardising rollback and readiness checks.

Security, Compliance & Continuity :

- Apply and maintain security baselines and hardening standards for cloud, on-prem and SaaS environments; operate vulnerability management and patching pipelines with posture dashboards.

- Ensure policy and regulatory obligations e.g. CE+ etc. are met using automated evidence; support the BCP/DR processes including immutable backups, cross-region replication and regular test cycles.

Commercials, Vendors & Asset/Cost Lifecycle :

- Manage vendors/MSPs and outsourced teams, tracking performance against SLAs/OLAs through scorecards, service management reporting and service reviews.

- Work with Finance on CAPEX/OPEX planning and consumption/capacity forecasting; re-forecast as required and collaborate with FinOps on chargeback and cost-optimisation reporting.

- Govern the asset and service lifecycle from adoption to retirement in line with global standards and policies.

Skills, Experience & Qualifications :

Essential :

- Experience managing platform operations in regulated environments, ensuring controls are implemented, monitored, audit-ready and supported by regularly tested disaster-recovery processes.

- Skilled in applying ITIL 4 practices, including managing major incidents, contributing to problem investigations and improvements, coordinating change activity, and maintaining SLO/SLI and error-budget adherence.

- Hands-on experience supporting Azure environments at scale, including landing zones, identity/RBAC, networking, storage, PaaS and container platforms, using Infrastructure-as-Code approaches.

- Practical experience configuring and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps), supporting build and release processes, using feature flags/canary deployments and ensuring reliable rollback mechanisms.

- Experience operating security and continuity controls including vulnerability and patch cycles, least-privilege/RBAC enforcement, backup operation validation and support for defined RTO/RPO targets.

- Skilled in managing MSP and SaaS vendors, monitoring SLAs/OLAs, contributing to service reviews and scorecards, and supporting cloud cost optimisation through forecasting, analysing consumption and using commitment models.

- Familiarity with ITSM tooling such as ServiceNow/Jira, including incident/change governance, request workflows and contributing to accurate CMDB/service mapping for impact-based change analysis.

- Experience collaborating across distributed teams, coordinating activities across time zones, sharing knowledge, and communicating effectively with stakeholders, service owners and senior leaders.

Key Competencies :

- Customer-Centric Approach : Passionate about delivering outstanding service experiences and exceeding user expectations.

- Analytical Thinking : Capable of interpreting complex data to drive decisions and improvements.

- Collaboration : Able to build strong partnerships across teams, service providers, and end users.

- Adaptability : Comfortable navigating a dynamic, fast-paced environment and responding to changing priorities.

- Leadership : Skilled at motivating and managing teams to achieve high standards of service delivery.