Advanced Research Computing Service Manager - IT Services - 107333 - Grade 9

The postholder will be part of the Advanced Research Computing Team (ARC) in IT Services, a well-respected and highly performant team with a national and international profile. The ARC Service Manager is a key leadership, administrative and organisational position designed to maximise the success of ARC, BEAR, Baskerville NCR and future regional or national services by coordinating many aspects of their operation, programmes and finances. These strategically important services and programmes are crucial and provide world-class research infrastructure to a wide range of researchers across all Colleges.

The postholder will collaborate closely with staff from all ARC groups and with operational, administrative, research and leadership staff from many different parts of the University. They will identify potential issues, blockers and problems early, act or provide advice to avoid or mitigate them, and communicate and liaise effectively to try to minimise the impact of issues and maximise the benefits of the services delivered by ARC, as well as promoting the adoption of best practices.

Reporting to the Head of ARC, the role includes overseeing planning, statistics and monitoring related to the usage and performance of ARC's services. The postholder will create reports and papers to update senior stakeholders and committees. The role also includes liaising with staff from across IT Services and other Professional Services divisions. The role supports ARC's group leaders in coordinating finances, programmes, activity and communication across ARC teams to ensure effective delivery and operation, and to identify potential problems or blockers early and act or provide advice to avoid or mitigate them.

Main Duties

• Delivery Plan: Maintain and continuously develop an overall ARC delivery plan, incorporating all major initiatives and programmes across ARC. Ensure ARC's services provide the necessary world-class research infrastructures to support thousands of researchers from many disciplines. Provide project and programme management support for major ARC infrastructure initiatives, such as procurement, delivery, installation, and go-live of large-scale HPC, storage, or data platforms.
• Risks: Maintain a coordinated overview of key milestones, risks, interdependencies, and resource needs across ARC projects. Actively manage the day-to-day operational and tactical aspects of multiple large-scale projects to mitigate and minimise risk.
• Team Priorities: Liaise with all ARC line managers to ensure staff priorities and workloads align with the ARC delivery plan and ARC's operational priorities. Integrate and coordinate operational activity across ARC teams, ensuring effective prioritisation, communication, and resource allocation.
• Quality: Maintain awareness of day-to-day operations across ARC's service portfolio (compute, storage, data services, research platforms, national service integrations), ensuring high service quality and consistency.
• User Support: Oversee ARC's ServiceNow ticket queues, ensuring appropriate progress on complex or stalled tickets, spotting patterns or emerging issues, and enabling automation where beneficial.
• Finance: Maintain accurate and comprehensive financial records for all ARC budgets (core staff budgets, cost-recovered roles, capital infrastructure, premium services, training income, and other funding streams). Track all financial commitments - existing, planned, and anticipated - and maintain an up-to-date multi-year financial forecast across ARC services. Work closely with the Head of ARC, IT Services Finance, College Finance, and RSSD colleagues to ensure all financial information is accurate, timely, and aligned with institutional processes.
• Research Software Group: Ensure the Research Software Group's Work Plan includes high-quality planning and reporting data; cross-reference project activity with financial data to ensure correct costings, billing, and recharge processing.
• Metrics and Performance: Oversee the collection, monitoring, and analysis of performance metrics across ARC services, including utilisation, user demographics, service availability, engagement volume, and cost-recovery indicators. Provide regular operational and performance reports for senior stakeholders, governance groups, and relevant University committees.
• Line manage the "Baskerville Operations and Resource Manager" position.
• Support ARC leadership in preparing business cases, investment proposals, and funding bids.
• If required, deputise for the Head of ARC in any context (within the University or externally).
• In addition to University provided training and development, you will undertake sufficient personal and professional development as required, ensuring skills and knowledge are up to date so that the role is performed to the required level.
• Develops and implements a culture (including policies and procedures) that promotes Equality and values diversity and inclusion.
• Supports the University's sustainability agenda through resource efficient working.
• Any other duties commensurate with the grade.

• Degree level education or equivalent experience, with substantial experience in complex operational or administrative roles within research computing, digital infrastructure, IT services, or a similar technical environment.
• Significant experience managing operational activities, processes, or services in multi team or multidisciplinary environments, including supporting technical teams with administrative, financial, or operational matters.
• Demonstrable experience in financial management, budgeting, forecasting, and oversight of resource intensive services.
• Experience contributing to business cases, investment proposals, or external funding bids (desirable: UKRI or similar funders).
• Experience in process improvement or change management within a technical or research environment.
• Understanding of research computing environments (e.g., HPC, cloud, storage, research software), or the ability to acquire such knowledge quickly.
• Strong organisational and project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple competing priorities and deadlines.
• High data literacy, including confidence interpreting dashboards, service metrics, utilisation reports, spreadsheets, and financial data.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to produce clear reports, papers for senior committees, and accessible summaries for non-technical audiences.
• Strong interpersonal and relationship management skills, able to build productive relationships across complex organisational structures and work collaboratively within multi-disciplinary teams.
• Understanding of research culture, UK Higher Education governance, compliance requirements, and broader sector or commercial awareness.
• Familiarity with ITIL aligned service management processes (desirable).
• Proactive problem solver with sound judgement and the ability to work independently.
• Comfortable working with senior stakeholders, including directors, PIs, committee chairs, and external partners.
• Ability to anticipate emerging issues and develop strategic responses.
• Excellent attention to detail, accuracy, and clarity in communication.
• Self-motivated learner committed to ongoing professional development.
• Actively promotes equality and diversity to internal and external stakeholders.
• Able to use data to identify equality and diversity issues.Experience of developing interventions to address equality and diversity issues.

The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University. We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work. Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries. The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens. Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham Background Central IT Services at the University of Birmingham use complex, large-scale architectures based on Unix, Linux, Windows and cloud technologies, coupled with advanced storage solutions. These need to be configured and maintained to the highest possible standards of reliability, performance and quality. Business continuity and high service levels are demanded equally for mission-critical research services as well as for those relied on for teaching, learning and administration. Advanced Research Computing (ARC) builds and runs (or buys-in) a range of specialist services for researchers, collectively known as BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research). Aimed at all disciplines, BEAR covers an increasingly broad spectrum of needs, ranging from the traditional HPC through storage and archiving solutions to collaboration and analytics tools. ARC also delivers Baskerville; a leading GPU accelerated National Compute Resource (NCR) and supports researchers using specialist regional and national services. Together with the national supercomputer ARCHER2 (Tier 1) and Birmingham's own BEAR infrastructure, these supercomputers form a powerful resource for research., We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website .