HEAD OF SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Om jobbet

Scandinavian Airlines System SAS

Senior Operational Service Manager - Mission-Critical IT

In this role, you will hold end-to-end accountability for service stability, availability, and resilience while leading operational teams responsible for daily service delivery in a high-availability, 24/7 environment. During major disruptions, you will act as Major Incident Manager (MIM), coordinating crisis response, communication, and recovery.

You bring strong operational leadership, ITIL and SRE expertise, and a software-engineering mindset that enables proactive improvements, automation, and long-term service resilience.

Challenges you will work on

You will own the operational performance of mission-critical services, ensuring they meet SLAs, SLOs, and business expectations. The role includes leading distributed teams across geographies and time zones, strengthening collaboration between operations, engineering, vendors, and business stakeholders, and fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

You will play a key role during critical incidents by leading cross-functional response teams, driving structured incident management, and ensuring clear executive communication. The role also includes shaping and governing a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function with defined escalation paths, on-call models, and operational procedures.

Continuous improvement is central, including identifying structural weaknesses, reducing recurring incidents, and translating insights into measurable improvements in availability, recovery, and predictability. You will collaborate closely with engineering teams to ensure operability and resilience are built into solutions while promoting automation, observability, and infrastructure as code.

Key responsibilities

Operational service ownership & availability

End-to-end accountability for mission-critical IT services

Ensure high availability, reliability, and performance aligned with SLAs and business expectations

Act as senior escalation point for risks impacting safety, revenue, or customer experience

Oversee availability management, capacity planning, resilience, and failover strategies

Leadership

Provide direction and priorities for distributed operational teams

Lead teams across time zones, including offshore delivery units

Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement

Establish clear onshore/offshore interfaces and handover models

Support competence development and long-term capability building

Major Incident Management & crisis leadership

Act as Major Incident Manager during critical disruptions

Lead cross-functional response teams and manage incident command structures

Ensure clear executive communication and drive post-incident learning

24/7 operations

Ensure effective operation of a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function

Define shift and on-call models, escalation paths, and operational procedures

Balance service quality, response speed, resilience, and cost efficiency

Continuous improvement

Evolve operational processes aligned with ITIL and SRE practices

Identify recurring issues and drive measurable improvements in MTTR, RTO, RPO, and availability

Ensure effective use of tools such as ServiceNow and collaborate with engineering teams to embed resilience

Promote automation, observability by design, and infrastructure as code

To be successful, we believe you have

7+ years in IT operations, service management, or reliability engineering

Experience from mission-critical environments such as aviation, telecom, finance, or large-scale platforms

Proven leadership of operational teams responsible for live services

Hands-on experience as Major Incident Manager and experience in 24/7 operational environments

Strong ITIL knowledge and understanding of SRE principles and distributed cloud/hybrid platforms

Ability to engage technically to influence operational and design decisions

You are calm, decisive, and confident under pressure, with strong ownership, a structured and proactive mindset, and the ability to communicate effectively across technical and business stakeholders.

Relevant education is beneficial but can be complemented by strong practical experience.

Additional information

Application deadline: 19 March 2026 (interviews conducted continuously).

Start date: As soon as possible.

Employment type: Full-time, including a 6-month probation period.

Location: Frösundavik (Stockholm), Copenhagen, or Oslo. Onsite presence is expected, with remote work possible upon agreement with your manager.