Systems Manager, Applications

End-to-End Landscape Ownership

• Own and maintain the full enterprise systems landscape, including production, staging, test, development, and training environments.
• Ensure environment consistency, data integrity, version control, and change synchronisation across all tiers of the landscape.
• Coordinate environment refreshes, provisioning, and tear-downs in collaboration with project and Saas providers.

Application & System Health Reporting

• Monitor application and system health metrics (availability, performance, error rates, capacity) across the landscape.
• Deliver regular reporting and dashboards to technology leadership and business stakeholders, highlighting issues, risks, and improvement opportunities.
• Define and maintain KPIs for system health and service performance, and ensure clear communication of trends and remediation actions.

Testing Environment Management

• Ensure availability, configuration, and appropriate isolation of testing environments to support development, UAT, QA, and project delivery needs.
• Manage environment refresh schedules, test data integrity, and system performance to reduce test delays and defects.
• Work with delivery teams to support environment-based issues and coordinate multi-system test cycles across dependencies.

SaaS & Third-Party Platform Oversight

• Manage operational support and lifecycle of all SaaS platforms and vendor-hosted solutions used by the organisation.
• Ensure SLAs, performance targets, and support agreements are met through proactive relationship management and escalation handling.
• Act as the main operational point of contact for key vendors, coordinating patches, releases, and issue resolution.

System Lifecycle & Change Planning

• Maintain system lifecycle plans, ensuring timely upgrades, renewals, or retirement of platforms and applications.
• Provide input to architecture and delivery teams to align roadmap decisions with system constraints and business timelines.
• Drive reduction of technical debt and complexity within the landscape.
• Operate the Change Approval Board (CAB) process: schedule and chair CAB meetings, ensure all proposed changes are properly risk-assessed, tested, documented, and approved prior to deployment.

Operational Support & Incident Management

• Lead the resolution of major incidents, coordinating across technical teams and vendors.
• Ensure root cause analysis and preventative actions are tracked and completed.
• Manage and improve operational support models, including support tiers and escalation protocols.

Security, Compliance & Risk Management

• Ensure that all systems and environments meet internal security, audit, and compliance requirements.
• Support risk assessments, access control reviews, and periodic audits of platforms and vendors.
• Maintain disaster recovery plans and ensure recovery procedures are tested for critical systems.

Team & Vendor Management

• Lead internal support staff and manage vendor and third-party teams responsible for system maintenance and support.
• Set clear expectations, monitor performance, and develop team capabilities around operational tooling, automation, and platform knowledge.
• Collaborate with procurement and vendor managers to evaluate service levels, contract compliance, and renewals.

Relevant experience & education

• 7+ years in IT systems, platform operations, or environment management roles.

• Strong experience with environment lifecycle and application landscape coordination (e.g., test/dev/prod tiers).

• Proven ability to manage both internally hosted and SaaS/third-party platforms.

• Proficiency in system health monitoring, reporting, and dashboarding (e.g., using Splunk, Datadog, Azure Monitor).

• Deep understanding of ITIL-based service management, incident handling, and change control.

• Experience managing vendors and ensuring service performance against agreed metrics.

• Experience in hybrid infrastructure environments (on-prem, cloud, SaaS).

• Familiarity with environment orchestration, containerisation, or infrastructure-as-code tools.

• Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments.

• ITIL certification and/or cloud platform certification (Azure, AWS).