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
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
Nice to have:
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)
Benefits
Why join Appvia?
We are a self-funded, London-based consultancy, growing rapidly while staying true to what got us here: a human, engineering-led culture built on trust, ownership, and getting things done.
As we scale, we’re maturing as a business and expanding into new areas across platform engineering, software, data, and AI. We’re intentional about keeping our culture at the heart of it. We operate with a flat structure, agile ways of working, and a strong focus on collaboration, where good ideas come from anywhere and people are trusted to make an impact.
We work alongside our customers to solve complex, real-world problems: modernising systems, improving delivery, and building scalable platforms that enable long-term success.
If you want to be part of a team that values people as much as technology and gives you the space to grow while working on meaningful challenges, Appvia is the place to do it.
What’s on offer?
⚖️ Work-life balance
Flexible working hours - because we know life happens outside of work
Hybrid working - outcomes focused working
25 days’ holiday a year, plus bank holidays
An additional day off for your birthday
Enhanced maternity and paternity to full pay
Workplace Nursery Benefit to help working parents
💚 For your well-being
Full Private Healthcare cover for you with partners and children covered 50%
Death in Service
Cycle to Work scheme
Electric Car Scheme
Pension plus a salary sacrifice option for even greater savings
Employee Assistance Programme
Free hygiene products available in the London office
🧠 Mental health support
Free therapy through AXA
Access to the Headspace App
Trained Mental Health First Aiders
😃 Other fun perks
Learning budget of £1,000 a year
Your own MacBook Pro while you work at Appvia
Dog friendly office
Wear what makes you comfortable
Free snacks in the office
Pool table & ping pong table
Regular team socials, board game nights, industry meetups and more!
But don’t just take our word for it, you can check out what our Appvians say about us on Glassdoor and by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.
We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and actively encourage, respect, and recognise diversity of thought and background throughout the business. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity, and disability status.
Note: While all roles are active and approved at the time of posting, the dynamic nature of our start-up means some applications may be processed to pipeline talent for future opportunities rather than current openings. We will strive to keep you informed of any changes to the status of your application.