Job Description

Job Title:

Service Operations Manager – Cloud and Platform Operations

Area:

Group Digital – Service Operations

Location:

UK

Reporting:

Service Operations Lead – Cloud and Platform Operations

Grade:

C

SFIA Skill:

Multiple

SFIA Level:

4/5

• Manage the operation, performance and continual improvement of cloud and platform services, ensuring SLAs, security requirements and quality standards are consistently met. (ITMG)

• Monitor and analyse service performance, negotiate and maintain SLAs, and initiate actions to maintain or improve service levels. (SLMO)

• Prioritise, diagnose and manage incidents — leading major incident response, root‑cause analysis and improvements to prevent recurrence. (USUP)

• Work with SIAM, Technical Teams and the Business to oversee the Investigation, documentation and resolution of underlying problems, coordinating cross‑team fixes, analysing trends and implementing preventative measures. (PBMG)

• Ensure that Assessment, planning and implementation of changes happens safely, ensuring risks are evaluated, approvals obtained and change processes followed to protect service integrity. (CHMG)

• Work with Security and Technical Teams to Investigate any breaches, IOC and ensure they are resolved.

• Support or lead DR planning/testing and recommend improvements to maintain agreed uptime. (AVMT)

• Work with SIAM to monitor and performance and capacity requirements, identify issues and support or lead capacity planning to ensure cloud and platform services scale effectively. (CPMG)

• Apply and monitor security controls, investigate breaches, assess risks, ensure compliance with policies and recommend improvements to strengthen security. (SCTY)

• Monitor and manage supplier performance, resolve operational issues collaboratively, benchmark service delivery and drive improvements. (SUPP)

• Manage stakeholder expectations, facilitate clear communication, gather feedback and support decisions to maintain effective relationships. (RLMT)

• Analyse processes, identify improvement opportunities, exploit technology/automation and contribute to organisational standards and guidelines. (BPRE)

Platform Strategy & Governance

• Manage the UK and Swiss Firm’s 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 Colo 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.

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.

• 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 of the Governance of Azure environments at scale, including landing zones, identity/RBAC, networking, storage, PaaS and container platforms, using Infrastructure‑as‑Code approaches.

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps), supporting build and release processes, using feature flags/canary deployments and ensuring reliable rollback mechanisms.

• Experience of managing 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.