Head of Service Operations & Incident Leadership

The Head of Service sits at the point where Raidiam's engineering work meets our worldwide customers. You will be accountable for ensuring that software reaches customers reliably and safely, that production environments stay healthy, and that when things go wrong, they are resolved quickly and professionally. You are the person who owns the last mile of delivery: the releases, the incidents, the service desk, and the accountability that runs through all of them. This is not a role for someone who manages process from a distance. You will be in the room during incidents, owning the client communication layer and quarterbacking recovery efforts alongside senior engineering leads. You will inherit a backlog of corrective actions that need driving to closure across teams you do not directly manage. You will be handed a set of OKRs and make them yours. This is a senior leadership role reporting into the Head of Operations Engineering, working closely with engineering, product, customer success, and leadership teams across a globally distributed SaaS business. You will bring structure and rigour without bureaucracy, and the confidence to hold people to account and the judgement to bring them with you.

Service Ownership and Incident Management

• Quarterback incident response: own the client communication layer during P1s and major incidents, coordinating with engineering leads and ensuring every stakeholder is informed, never surprised.
• Foster a culture of fast incident response; drive post-incident reviews to completion, with initial RCAs and full RCAs provided within contractually defined timelines.
• Ensure corrective actions are assigned, tracked, and chased to closure - across engineering teams you do not manage, using influence and visibility rather than authority.
• Own the on-call and escalation structure, ensuring the right people are reached at the right time.

Service Desk and SLA Management

• Own the service desk end-to-end: tooling, processes, SLAs, and team performance.
• Be accountable for SLA compliance across all client environments; know the numbers, report them, and drive improvement when they slip.
• Track SLA metrics to support monthly governance and ensure process improvement is a constant focus to protect Raidiam's commercial commitments.
• Shape monitoring and alerting effectiveness, keeping false positive rates low and ensuring runbooks exist for all production environment events.

Release Coordination

• Own the client-facing release process: scheduling, communication, and sign-off coordination with customers and internal teams.
• Partner with the Platform engineering team, who own the release tooling and technical execution, to ensure releases land safely and without surprise for customers.
• Advocate for improvements to the release process and ensure domain knowledge is documented, accessible, and not dependent on individuals.

Measurement and Continuous Improvement

• Take full ownership of team and service OKRs: measure them, report them, and drive improvement proactively.
• Run regular service reviews to inspect key metrics, including cost tracking, and identify trends before they become incidents.
• Build and maintain a service knowledge base and incident playbooks, ensuring the team operates from a single, consistent source of truth.

Team and Stakeholder Leadership

• Lead and develop the service team, scaling it in line with company growth, setting clear goals aligned to team and company OKRs.
• Act as the senior escalation point for customer-impacting issues.
• Represent service operations in cross-functional planning and roadmap discussions.
• As a senior leader, you will be expected to model Raidiam's information security standards and corporate policies across your team and the broader organisation.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven track record leading service or operations functions in a global SaaS business.
• Strong incident management experience: you have owned the client communication layer during a major outage, run rigorous post-mortems, and driven corrective actions to completion.
• Demonstrated ability to hold teams to account without direct authority - chasing outcomes across engineering, product, and customer success until things are done.
• Experience defining, meeting, and reporting on SLAs with enterprise customers.
• Release and change management in regulated or high-compliance environments.
• Proficiency with Jira Service Management and PagerDuty, or equivalent ITSM and on-call tooling.
• Technical background and cloud infrastructure awareness, particularly with AWS: you do not need to be an engineer, but you need to speak the language.
• Excellent communication skills: able to translate technical issues for non-technical stakeholders and vice versa.
• Comfortable working remotely across multiple time zones.
• Firm enough to hold the line; personable enough to bring people with you.

Bonus points for

• Experience using AI tools to improve productivity, accelerate documentation, and enhance service processes.
• Familiarity with PKI, Certificate Authorities, and certificate lifecycle management.
• Knowledge of OAuth 2.0, mTLS, FAPI, or financial-grade API security standards.
• Experience within financial services, fintech, or other regulated industries.

What can you expect from us?

• 37.5 hour working week with flexible hours.
• 25 days annual leave (increasing with length of service), plus bank holidays.
• Base salary £80,000.
• Upon successful completion of your probationary period: Health Cash Plan, Death in Service, Cycle to Work and lifestyle savings discounts.
• Auto-enrolment in pension scheme with 5% employer contribution.
• Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave.
• Enrolment in company equity share option scheme.

This is a UK-based role and does not offer visa sponsorship. You must be legally able to work in the UK and will be asked to confirm this upon applying.