Head of Support & Service Reliability Engineering

Semafone

Semafone

Customer Service

Guildford, UK

Posted on May 21, 2026

We are seeking a Head of Support & Service Reliability to lead and evolve our global support function into a proactive, platform-integrated reliability capability.

This role provides an exciting and dynamic opportunity for an outcome focused individual; as Sycurio is in a critical inflection point as we transition from a single-tenant architecture to a multi-tenant SaaS platform, requiring a fundamental shift from reactive ticket handling to systemic reliability, observability, and customer experience management at scale.

You will own the end-to-end operational integrity of the platform, ensuring availability, performance, and customer trust, while partnering closely with Engineering, Product, and Customer-facing teams; being a key contributor to our GRR goal of 90%+

Sycurio employs a strategic managed service provider who provides the people, tooling, and day-to-day execution across all support tiers. The Head of Support sets the standards, governs vendor performance, and ensures every aspect of the support experience — from incident response to customer satisfaction — meets enterprise-grade expectations

Key Responsibilities:

    • Service Reliability & Platform Stability

    • Own platform availability, performance, and reliability across all tenants

    • Reduce incident frequency, severity, and blast radius

    • Establish and drive Service Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles

    • Ensure scalability and operational readiness of a multi-tenant platform

    • Incident Management & Response

    • Implement and lead a structured incident management framework (P1–P4)

    • Act as executive owner of major incidents (P1/P2)

    • Drive improvements in:

    • Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

    • Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

    • Ensure clear, consistent internal and external communication during incidents

    • Observability & Monitoring

    • Define and implement a comprehensive observability strategy, including:

    • Technical telemetry (infrastructure, application, APIs)

    • Business telemetry (transactions, payment success rates, usage)

    • End-to-end customer journey visibility

    • Ensure issues are detected proactively, not customer-reported

    • Partner with Product and Engineering to embed telemetry into the platform

    • Support Operations (L1–L3)

    • Lead global support teams ensuring high-quality, SLA-driven case management

    • Define and enforce support processes, tooling, and performance standards

    • Improve key metrics:

    • First response time

    • Resolution time

    • Reopen rate

    • Escalation quality

    • Platform Operations & Change Management

    • Oversee operational aspects of the platform, including:

    • Release management and deployment safety, ensuring all releases are observable, reversible, and low-risk

    • Change control processes

    • Environment consistency across staging and production

    • Own the visibility and continuous improvement of delivery and recovery performance using the DORA metrics, in partnership with Engineering

    • Issue Management & Root Cause Discipline

    • Establish rigorous Root Cause Analysis (RCA) standards

    • Identify and eliminate systemic issues (not just symptom fixes)

    • Track and reduce recurring incidents

    • Feed insights into Product and Engineering roadmaps

    • Customer Experience & Commercial Alignment

    • Align support with Customer Success and Sales

    • Ensure coordinated communication during incidents

    • Protect customer relationships during critical events

    • Introduce tenant-aware impact assessment (ARR, strategic accounts, regulatory exposure)

    • Support enterprise-grade expectations for transparency and reliability

    • Cross-functional Leadership

    • Act as the bridge between:

    • Engineering

    • Product

    • Customer Delivery / Success

    • Embed supportability and operational readiness into:

    • Pre-sales (Stage 4/5 governance)

    • Product development

    • Deployment processes

    • Managed Service Governance

    • Chair regular operational reviews and quarterly business reviews with the managed service leadership team

    • Own the managed service scorecard — defining KPIs, reviewing performance data, and driving accountability for misses

    • Manage contract compliance, SLA adherence, and commercial exposure from managed service underperformance

    • Lead continuous improvement programs jointly with the managed service provider, including tooling upgrades, process redesigns, and training investments

    • Maintain an escalation path for systemic or persistent managed service failure, up to and including remediation planning

Key qualifications, skills, experience:

    Required

    • 10+ years in Support, Platform Operations, or SRE leadership roles

    • Proven experience in multi-tenant SaaS and legacy environments

    • Strong understanding of:

    • Distributed systems

    • Incident management at scale

    • Observability frameworks

    • Track record of building and scaling high-performing operational teams

    • Experience in outsourced or hybrid operational models

    • Experience working cross-functionally with Engineering and Product

    Preferred

    • Background in payments, security, or compliance-driven environments (e.g., PCI)

    • Experience with API-first platforms and telephony/payment flows

    • Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Grafana, etc.)

See more open positions at Semafone