Service Operations Lead | Networks in Newtownabbey

Location: Belfast

Salary: Up to £58,000 - £65,000 + 10% Bonus

Benefits: 10% Company Pension + Share Schemes + Excellent Benefits

Hybrid Working: 3 On Site | 2 Remote

Eligibility for Security Clearance (SC) and Police Personnel Vetting (PPV3) is required. Applicants must have a minimum of 5 consecutive years' UK residency or working history.

The Role In a Nutshell:

Own the technical health of a live, business-critical managed service end to end, 24x7x365, for one of the UK's most demanding enterprise customers. This is the role for an engineer who wants to be the definitive technical authority on a service: the person who leads the room during major incidents, challenges the status quo, and turns complex networking estates into stable, resilient, improving platforms.

The Business:

One of the UK's most established communications and technology businesses, serving large enterprise and public-sector customers with mission-critical networks, voice and managed services. With significant annual investment in research and development and a substantial UK engineering workforce, this business has the scale, the technology and the customer base to take on the country's most complex programmes. The business invests genuinely in career development, world-class training, and the kind of work that accelerates a technical career.

Your Responsibilities:

• Own the technical health of the live service end to end, ensuring changes, incidents and improvements protect customer outcomes.
• Assess complex in-life changes and clearly explain impact, risk and options to customers, account teams and delivery partners.
• Act as the main technical point of contact during live service, linking customers, internal teams and partners for complex decisions.
• Lead complex incidents to resolution, coordinating multiple teams and challenging delays or unclear ownership.
• Work with internal resolver teams, suppliers and third parties to operate stable services and resolve issues quickly.
• Challenge current designs and propose improvements that increase performance, resilience and value.
• Actively manage the technical estate, identifying capacity limits, end-of-life risks, vulnerabilities and required actions.
• Build trusted relationships with customers, suppliers and internal teams, influencing through expertise and authority.
• Keep all technical documentation accurate and up to date.

Skills & Experience:

• Technical accreditation to Professional or Specialist level (or equivalent), with a strong working knowledge of ITIL practices.
• Proven experience technically supporting a 24/7 live managed customer solution across networking technology, working with a host of third parties and suppliers.
• Strong technical governance and risk-based decision making, with the ability to set and interpret technical standards and make defensible decisions.
• Demonstrable incident leadership and operational control, coordinating stakeholders and driving timely restoration under pressure.
• Deep end-to-end service understanding, including how upstream and downstream dependencies affect outcomes in production.
• Strong stakeholder management and the ability to communicate complex technical issues clearly.
• Ability to obtain and hold all required clearances (SC, NPPV, etc.).

The following would be an advantage:

• Strong understanding of network and software-defined networking technologies (Cisco, Aruba, Juniper, Fortinet, Nutanix, AWS, Azure).
• Exposure to emerging technologies across the full IT spectrum.
• Automation and observability experience: tooling, dashboards, alert tuning and runbooks.
• Commercial awareness of SLAs, OLAs, penalties and regulatory expectations.

Other skills required:

• Technical Authority: Credibility to set technical direction, interpret standards and make defensible, risk-based decisions others trust.
• Incident Leadership: Ability to take control during major incidents, maintain situational awareness and drive clear comms to timely restoration.
• Stakeholder Influence: Exceptional communication skills, building rapport with customers and suppliers and influencing through expertise rather than authority alone.
• Improvement Mindset: A proactive instinct for spotting risk and inefficiency early and driving meaningful service improvement.
• Coaching & Knowledge Transfer: Ability to upskill operational teams, transferring customer-specific knowledge and technical insight.

Benefits:

• 10% on-target annual bonus.
• 10% company pension scheme.
• Company share saving schemes.
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays, increasing with service.
• World-class training and development opportunities.
• Wide range of flexible benefits.
• Hybrid working: 3 days on site, 2 days remote.