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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Senior Service Manager - Active UK SC Clearance Required - **Company:** Appvia - **Location:** London, UK - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** £60,000.0 - £80,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Agile Methodology, Amazon Web Services, JIRA, Microsoft Azure, Spreadsheets, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Live Connect (Windows), Site Reliability Engineering Practices, Service Design, Datadog, Grafana, SC Clearance, Dynatrace, Pagerduty, Servicenow - **Published:** October 17, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/details/5930998555 ## About the Role 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, * 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) ## Description We're looking for an experienced Senior Service Manager to join Appvia on a large UK government digital service, at the point where a live service is being replaced by a brand new one. This role blends three things: designing how a service should be run, managing it day to day, and helping new services move safely into live. People who are brilliant at all three are rarer than a quiet on-call shift, so service design and service management are the priorities. Transition experience is a welcome bonus. You'll design the support model for the new service, so incidents go straight to the team that owns the component instead of taking the scenic route past every other team first. You'll run incident and problem management, get the problem backlog heading in the right direction (down), and build a technical first line with runbooks people actually use. In time, you'll build a sensible service management culture with SLAs and OLAs, keeping senior stakeholders informed without burying them in status reports. We want a modern approach. You'll know ITIL well, and you'll also know when to put it back on the shelf. This service is built by agile teams who release often, so we're looking for lightweight change, automation over manual hand-offs, and service readiness built into each team's definition of done rather than checked at the end. You'll work closely with engineering teams, SREs, the customer's central service management function and frontline operational teams, and be the person who joins them all up. You'll also support and develop a small incident management team. This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys designing services that work in the real world, then rolling their sleeves up to run them. Interview Process - 2 Stage 1. Discovery conversation with Talent Acquisition 2. Final interview with Appvia / customer-facing leadership Important You must be eligible for UK Security Clearance (SC)., Service design * 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 Service management * 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 Automation and improvement * 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 Service transition * 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 Technical / Service Management Skills Core: * 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