Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
£59,031 to £80,000 per annum

About the Role
Platform Services provides a suite of critical enterprise technology capabilities that underpin multiple Rail Delivery Group products and services. These include cloud infrastructure, identity and access management services, API and integration platforms, monitoring and observability tooling, and other shared technology components. The Senior Service Manager – Platform Services is accountable for the tactical and strategic management of these shared capabilities, ensuring they are delivered securely, reliably, and in accordance with agreed service levels and contractual obligations. This role acts as a single point of accountability for a highly critical service environment where failures can impact multiple products and customers simultaneously.

The post holder will lead service governance across a complex multi-supplier ecosystem, coordinating cloud providers, infrastructure suppliers, platform partners, internal architecture teams, and product teams to ensure effective operational delivery. The role requires a strong understanding of modern cloud platforms, platform operations, service reliability, infrastructure dependencies, and operational risk management.

The Senior Service Manager will drive platform resilience, oversee major incident response, coordinate cross-supplier recovery activities, and ensure platform capabilities evolve to meet the needs of RDG and the wider rail industry.

Key Responsibilities
Service Ownership and Governance: Act as the accountable service owner for Platform Services. Define and maintain the Service Model, Service Design Package, and operational support model. Establish service governance arrangements across internal and external stakeholders. Ensure services operate in accordance with contractual obligations, service levels, and operational policies. Maintain service roadmaps aligned to strategic technology and business objectives. Drive service maturity and continuous improvement activities.

Platform Operations: Oversee the operational management of cloud, infrastructure, identity, API, and monitoring services. Ensure effective monitoring, observability, and operational control arrangements are in place. Maintain visibility of platform health, performance, capacity, and resilience. Proactively identify operational risks and coordinate mitigation activities. Review service performance against KPIs, SLAs, and operational objectives.

Major Incident and Problem Management: Lead service response during major incidents affecting Platform Services. Coordinate technical and operational activities across multiple suppliers and support teams. Ensure clear ownership, communication, and escalation during service disruption. Chair major incident reviews and post-incident investigations. Drive root cause analysis and problem management activities. Ensure lessons learned result in measurable service improvements.

Supplier and Partner Management: Manage relationships with platform suppliers and technology partners. Coordinate service delivery across cloud, infrastructure, identity, and integration providers. Hold suppliers accountable for contractual performance and service outcomes. Facilitate cross-supplier collaboration and dispute resolution. Review supplier performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

Change and Release Governance: Ensure platform changes are assessed for operational and business impact. Provide service management oversight of platform releases and infrastructure changes. Participate in Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB) processes. Ensure operational readiness activities are completed prior to service introduction or change. Validate rollback, support, and recovery arrangements.

Resilience, Business Continuity and Security: Own platform service continuity and disaster recovery governance. Ensure resilience requirements are understood and tested. Coordinate disaster recovery exercises and service resilience reviews. Support security incident response and remediation activities. Ensure operational risks associated with platform services are actively managed and reported.

Stakeholder Engagement: Build effective relationships with product owners, service managers, architecture teams, suppliers, and industry stakeholders. Provide clear and timely communication during operational events. Present service performance, risks, and improvement plans to governance forums and senior leadership. Represent Platform Services within industry and RDG operational forums.

Experience
- Extensive experience in Service Management within complex technology environments.
- Strong understanding of ITIL Service Management principles and practices.
- Experience managing cloud-hosted and enterprise-scale technology services.
- Experience coordinating multiple suppliers within a service delivery environment.
- Strong understanding of cloud platforms (Azure and/or AWS), identity and access management, API and integration platforms, infrastructure and hosting services, and monitoring and observability tooling.
- Experience leading Major Incident and Problem Management activities.
- Experience managing operational risk within mission-critical services.
- Ability to translate technical issues into business impacts.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Experience working within a 24x7 operational environment.

About you
You are a proactive and strategic service management professional with strong leadership skills. You thrive in complex, multi-supplier environments and have a passion for driving service reliability and continuous improvement. You communicate effectively with technical teams and senior stakeholders alike and are comfortable managing operational risk in critical service environments.

Qualifications
- ITIL v4 Foundation or higher (desirable).
- Experience of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts (desirable).
- Experience of platform engineering or cloud operations environments (desirable).
- Experience of regulated or critical national infrastructure environments (desirable).
- Knowledge of rail industry operational systems and service delivery models (desirable).