Service Management Enterprise Architect in Manchester

Contract: 3 months

Location: Salford

Days in office: 3 days onsite (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) 2 days working remotely

Travel: Occasional between London/Manchester

Scope of the role:

Our Retail Client is accelerating delivery of a new Configuration Management Database (CMDB) built on BMC Helix, with integration requirements spanning Helix Discovery, Dynatrace, SCCM/Intune, SolarWinds, and other estate systems. An experienced contract Service Management Enterprise Architect is urgently required to stabilise the CMDB design, ensure alignment with Design Authority governance, and lead service management centric architecture decisions during the implementation.

Job Purpose:

As a Service Management Enterprise Architect, you will provide direct architecture leadership across the full lifecycle of our client's new Helix based CMDB. You will ensure the CMDB design is enterprise grade, supportable, secure, reconciled, and aligned to operational, service, and business capability models. You will function as the architectural bridge between Service Management, Infrastructure, Networks, Observability, Product & Engineering tribes, and partner organisations such as KTSL. You will bring clarity to data models, discovery patterns, integration flows, ownership, reconciliation logic, and service taxonomy, enabling our client to launch the CMDB to production with confidence.

Key Responsibilities:

• CMDB & Helix Architecture Ownership – Define and own the end to end CMDB architecture, including discovery, integrations, reconciliation, data mastering, lineage, and service models. Evaluate and recommend the approach for CMDB requirements for services that are delivered through PaaS, SaaS and outsourced services. Review and redesign integration patterns involving Helix Discovery, Dynatrace, SCCM/Intune, SolarWinds, and other asset pipelines. Ensure designs comply with ITSM practices (Incident, Change, Problem, Request) and support operational processes. Align CMDB data structures to our client's Metamodel, EA standards, and post cyber incident requirements.
• Design Authority & Governance – Prepare Design Authority submissions to the Networks & Enabling Tech Design Authority and Cross Tribe DA, ensuring holistic architectural assessment rather than piecemeal approvals. Drive fast cycle architectural decision making, ensuring traceability to principles, standards, and risk management.
• Service Management Architecture Leadership – Support the activities to map the CMDB against the Business Capability Model and identifying gaps and documenting assumptions where appropriate. Define target architectures, transitional states, and roadmaps for service management capabilities, leveraging best practice technology frameworks. Support teams in developing service taxonomies, support models, SLAs/OLAs, and service centric dependency maps.
• Cross Functional Stakeholder Engagement – Lead or participate in workshops with: oPoS, Networks, Datacentre, Observability, Cloud, EA, Finance, and Security. Drive alignment on asset onboarding, missing asset classes, and service relationship modelling.
• Technical Delivery Support – Translate architecture designs into actionable guidance for engineering teams and suppliers. Support troubleshooting, gap analysis, and mitigation activities impacting CMDB launch targets. Ensure integration patterns support resiliency, failover, and end to end reconciliation.

Required Experience & Skills:

• Proven experience architecting ITSM platforms (Helix preferred, ServiceNow or similar acceptable).
• Deep understanding of CMDB design, data modelling, discovery, reconciliation, and multi source CI ingestion.
• Familiarity with our client's tools and estate patterns, including Helix, Dynatrace, SCCM/Intune, and network monitoring tools.
• Experience with enterprise integration mechanisms (APIs, ETL, middleware, event pipelines).
• Strong grounding in ITIL v4, operational process design, and Service Management maturity uplift.
• Experience designing support models (L1‑L3), workflow integrations, and operational handoffs.
• Skilled in creating transitional architectures, roadmaps, principles, blueprints, and governance.
• Able to rationalise complex environments across infrastructure, cloud, applications, and platforms.
• Exceptional communication, cross team collaboration, and senior stakeholder influencing.
• Ability to simplify complexity into practical architectural decisions under time pressure.
• Comfortable working in rapid response, ambiguous, and high stakes transformation environments.

Deliverables (First 8–12 Weeks):

• End to end CMDB Architecture Pack for DA approval (incl. discovery, integrations, reconciliation flows).
• Updated CMDB Metamodel & Service Taxonomy, aligned to the clients Enterprise Metamodel.
• Integration redesign and gap plan addressing missing assets and data quality concerns.
• Interim CMDB roadmap including go live readiness, risk mitigation, and dependency mapping.
• Knowledge transfer plan to support permanent hires arriving Feb-April.