Key Responsibilities

• Service ownership and reliability
• Be the single accountable owner for the health of the live client service; define and hold SLAs/SLOs and a mature incident, problem, and change-management practice.
• Own major-incident response and the out-of-hours/on-call model for the live service, acting as the senior escalation point.
• Replace firefighting with proactive reliability: root-cause discipline, observability, and measurable reductions in downtime and change-failure rate.
• Platform, telephony, and estate
  • Own the evolution of the on-prem and cloud estate against a quarterly roadmap; treat the platform as a product with a single accountable owner.
  • Own the real-time voice/telephony infrastructure (SBCs, SIP trunks, media processing, carrier interconnects) as a first-class part of that estate, held to the same reliability, security, and roadmap discipline, with the telephony lead and specialists owning the hands-on engineering.
  • Lead the rationalisation and modernisation of a large, heterogeneous estate (many VMs and numerous bespoke deployments) and deliver its migration ahead of end-of-life deadlines.
  • Establish hardening and patching as an automated, low-churn discipline (co-owned with InfoSec), eliminating today's manual rollbacks and instability.
  • DevOps and developer experience (run side)
  • Take over and shape the run-side DevOps function, currently delivered by the outsourced partner: reliable CI/CD, environments, and golden paths for the running estate; partner with Engineering on release readiness; and assess where insourcing adds value over time.
  • Support
  • Own the Support and SRE function directly at the outset (delivered via the outsourced partner), moving it from a reactive to a proactive model with clear reliability interfaces, and hire a Head of Support as the function matures.
  • Partner and vendor management
  • Own the run-side operating model with the outsourced partner: SLAs, quality gates, capacity, and cost; be the single point of contact for run delivery, and hold a clear view on what to insource and when.
  • Building and leading the team
  • Build out the leadership and specialist bench beneath you over time: the Head of Support, the telephony specialist team, and selective insourcing of DevOps, in line with growth and budget.
  • Set the operating rhythm, engineering and reliability standards, and career development for the function.
  • Cross-functional leadership
  • Be the named interface across Engineering (the build-to-BAU operational-readiness handoff), InfoSec (co-owned security operations), and the commercial organisation: the person who makes the components deployed at a client work as one system.

  What success looks like in the first 12 months

  • The running estate has a single owner, a roadmap, and measurably fewer incidents and rollbacks.
  • The voice/telephony estate is under the same reliability and security discipline as the rest of the platform, with the specialist team established.
  • The end-of-life migration is planned and underway, with the estate materially rationalised and standardised.
  • Patching and hardening run as a scheduled, automated discipline rather than reactive churn.
  • The previously siloed client-facing functions operate from one cohesive service view.
  • A defined build-to-BAU operational-readiness bar is in place, agreed with Engineering and Architecture.
  • The outsourced-partner run-side relationship has a clear, measured operating model, with a considered view on what to insource.
  • Run-side service delivery (including telephony) is stabilised, with a clear operating interface to Customer Delivery's managed-service offer.
  • Early leadership hires (starting with the Head of Support) are scoped or underway.

Experience Required

Essential

• Senior leadership in technology operations, platform / SRE, or service delivery, ideally in a SaaS or managed-service / MSP setting.
• Proven ownership of a real-time, availability-critical production estate (on-prem or hybrid) that depends on third-party providers you do not control (carriers, networks, exchanges, or payment rails), with deep monitoring, capacity, and incident discipline.
• Hands-on and technical: able to set direction and make architectural trade-offs yourself, and to run support and DevOps directly until you have leads beneath you. This is not a role for a pure people-manager or a delegator.
• Understands real-time voice/session infrastructure well enough to direct a specialist team and hold it to account, even without being hands-on in it day to day.
• Track record managing outsourced / offshore delivery partners to SLAs and quality gates, with a clear view on when to insource.
• Strong incident / problem / change discipline (ITIL-informed, pragmatically applied, not bureaucratic), including major-incident and on-call ownership.
• A strong cross-functional operator who builds alignment across engineering, security, and commercial teams: the silo-breaker.

Desirable

• Hands-on background with voice/telephony infrastructure: SBCs, SIP, media processing, and carrier interconnects.
• Experience running a comparably real-time, provider-dependent estate in an adjacent domain: carrier / telco network operations, CPaaS (voice and messaging), payment or transaction switching, low-latency trading / market-data, or live streaming / broadcast.
• Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments (payments, PCI DSS, fintech, contact-centre technology).
• Experience building or insourcing a function from an outsourced baseline.

Additional Information

This will be a Hybrid role with a requirement to attend our Guildford office 1 day per week and based on business need.