Senior Service Manager - Active UK SC Clearance Required
Location: London, UK (Hybrid - typically 1-2 days per month in office)
Contract: Permanent, Full-time
Start: November 2026
Package: £60,000 - £80,000 + 10% Bonus + 10% Shares + Benefits
About Appvia
Appvia is a specialist cloud, platform, and solutions engineering consultancy, helping organisations modernise infrastructure, improve reliability, and adopt cloud-native practices that enable long-term, sustainable delivery.
Our engineering capability spans AWS, Azure, platform engineering, networking, software, data, AI, delivery, and managed services.
We work across complex, high-impact environments in both the public and private sector, where security, resilience, operational excellence, and service quality are critical.
About the Role
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
- Discovery conversation with Talent Acquisition
- Final interview with Appvia / customer-facing leadership
Important
You must be eligible for UK Security Clearance (SC).
Requirements
About You
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.
You will bring
- 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
Responsibilities
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
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Senior Service Manager - Active UK SC Clearance Required in City of London employer: Appvia
Appvia is an exceptional employer that prioritises employee growth and innovation within a collaborative work culture. With a focus on modernising infrastructure and adopting cloud-native practices, employees benefit from competitive packages, including bonuses and shares, while working in a hybrid environment that fosters flexibility and engagement in high-impact projects across the public sector. Joining Appvia means being part of a forward-thinking team where your expertise in cloud networking will directly contribute to meaningful solutions that enhance security and operational excellence.
