Service Delivery Manager

Role Purpose

The Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is accountable for the end-to-end delivery of managed services supporting critical national infrastructure (CNI) environments. The role ensures the availability, resilience, security, compliance, and continuous improvement of business-critical services operating in a 24x7 environment.

The SDM serves as the primary operational interface between the customer, service providers, technology partners, and internal delivery teams, driving service excellence while ensuring contractual commitments, regulatory obligations, and operational risks are effectively managed.

Given the nature of the services supporting national infrastructure, the role demands strong leadership in service governance, incident management, cyber resilience, business continuity, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory compliance.

Key Responsibilities

Service Delivery Leadership

• Own end-to-end service delivery for critical business and operational services.
• Ensure contractual service levels, KPIs, and operational commitments are consistently achieved.
• Lead multi-disciplinary delivery teams across operations, engineering, service management, security, infrastructure, and applications.

Customer & Stakeholder Management

• Act as the primary service management contact for senior customer stakeholders.
• Build trusted relationships with customer leadership, operational teams, regulators, and suppliers.
• Present service performance, risks, improvement initiatives, and strategic recommendations to executive stakeholders.

Operational Governance

• Ensure adherence to ITIL and customer-specific operational processes.

Major Incident & Crisis Management

• Provide leadership during major incidents and service outages.
• Coordinate technical teams, suppliers, and customer stakeholders during crisis situations.
• Ensure structured communication, escalation management, and post-incident reviews.
• Drive root cause elimination and preventative actions.

Security & Resilience Management

• Work closely with cyber security and risk teams to maintain secure operations.
• Lead service resilience planning, disaster recovery testing, and business continuity exercises.
• Ensure vulnerabilities, risks, and remediation activities are tracked and managed effectively.
• Support cyber incident response activities where required.

Service Improvement & Transformation

• Develop and maintain continual service improvement plans (CSIPs).
• Identify opportunities to improve service quality, automation, efficiency, and customer experience.
• Champion AI Ops, observability, automation, and proactive service management.

Commercial & Financial Management

• Manage service budgets, forecasts, and financial performance.
• Support contract governance and service reporting.

Risk & Assurance

• Maintain service, operational, security, and regulatory risk registers.
• Drive mitigation plans and ensure timely resolution of identified risks.
• Report operational risk posture to customer and internal leadership forums.

Required Experience

Essential

• 17+ years of experience in IT Service Delivery, Managed Services, or Infrastructure Operations.
• Experience delivering services within Critical National Infrastructure, Telecommunications or other highly regulated environments.
• Experience managing geographically distributed delivery teams and third-party suppliers.
• Hands-on experience with ITIL service management processes.