Senior Service Manager - Active UK SC Clearance Required

United Kingdom·LondonFull-timesenior

Other

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Quick Summary

Requirements Summary

Experience designing service and support models for digital services, including who owns what,

Technical Tools

Other

About the Role

~1 min read

You are an experienced Senior Service Manager who has designed and run live digital services built by agile, multi-team delivery, and who reaches for automation before reaching for another spreadsheet.

Experience designing service and support models for digital services, including who owns what, how incidents are routed and how the service is supported out of hours
Strong hands-on experience running live services: incident, problem and change management, including major/high-severity incident handling
A track record of reducing problem backlogs and fixing root causes
Experience working with agile product and engineering teams in a "you build it, you run it" model
Experience automating service management, such as alert routing, on-call tooling, ticket integration (e.g. ServiceNow to Jira) and pipeline-based change controls
Working knowledge of SRE practices such as SLOs, error budgets and post-incident reviews
Comfort with observability tools such as Dynatrace, Grafana or similar, enough to ask good questions of the data
Strong understanding of SLAs, OLAs, KPIs and service reporting
Experience defining operational readiness and service acceptance criteria for new services
Experience building or improving a first-line or technical triage function, including runbooks and knowledge articles
Strong ITIL 4 knowledge, applied with judgement rather than by the page
Experience identifying, managing, and escalating service risks appropriately
The ability to influence engineering teams, central service functions and senior stakeholders without direct authority
Experience mentoring or supporting the development of more junior service management colleagues
A proactive, structured, and pragmatic approach

Responsibilities

~1 min read

Design the target support model for a new digital service, so incidents route directly to the team that owns the component
Define a technical first-line triage capability with runbooks and clear escalation paths
Agree incident, problem and change SLAs, OLAs and reporting with the customer's central service management function
Map out-of-hours responsibilities across 24/7 operations and on-call engineering teams
Build service acceptance criteria into engineering teams' definition of done, covering monitoring, runbooks, alerting and support handover

Own day-to-day incident and problem management across the live and replacement services
Lead the response to major and high-severity incidents
Get root cause work started and completed quickly
Chair problem reviews and keep service records accurate, so reporting can be trusted
Agree how live problems get time from engineering teams focused on feature delivery
Provide clear reporting on service health, performance, risks, and actions
Support and develop a small incident management team

Tune alerting so alerts mean something and reach the right people
Replace manual escalation with automated alerting and on-call tooling
Automate the flow between service management and engineering tooling
Champion lightweight, pipeline-based change over heavyweight approval boards
Identify opportunities for continual service improvement

Plan operational readiness and early life support for a new service going live
Lead knowledge transfer to support teams before go-live
Support the decommissioning of the legacy service

Service design and support model design
Incident, Problem & Change Management, including major incident management
Agile and DevOps ways of working
Service management automation and tooling integration
SLA, OLA, SLO and KPI management
Operational readiness and service acceptance criteria
Service reporting and governance
Stakeholder management across engineering, operations and senior customer teams
Continual service improvement

Nice to Have

~1 min read

Active UK SC clearance
ITIL 4 or 5 certification
Service transition and early life support experience
ServiceNow and Jira, ideally integrated
Dynatrace, Grafana or similar observability tooling
PagerDuty, Opsgenie or similar on-call tooling
SRE experience or certification
Public sector experience, especially citizen facing digital services
Experience setting up a service desk or technical first-line function
Awareness of the cloud technologies underpinning a service (e.g. AWS, Azure)

What We Offer

~2 min read

We are a self-funded, London-based consultancy, growing rapidly while staying true to what got us here: a human, engineering-led culture built on trust, ownership, and getting things done.

As we scale, we’re maturing as a business and expanding into new areas across platform engineering, software, data, and AI. We’re intentional about keeping our culture at the heart of it. We operate with a flat structure, agile ways of working, and a strong focus on collaboration, where good ideas come from anywhere and people are trusted to make an impact.

We work alongside our customers to solve complex, real-world problems: modernising systems, improving delivery, and building scalable platforms that enable long-term success.

If you want to be part of a team that values people as much as technology and gives you the space to grow while working on meaningful challenges, Appvia is the place to do it.

✓Learning budget of £1,000 a year

✓Your own MacBook Pro while you work at Appvia

✓Dog friendly office

✓Wear what makes you comfortable

✓Free snacks in the office

✓Pool table & ping pong table

✓Regular team socials, board game nights, industry meetups and more!

⚖️ Work-life balance