Head of IT Ops/Service Management

Head of IT Operations

London or Newcastle Upon Tyne (hybrid)

The Head of IT Operations is responsible for leading business application support, service delivery, service transition, and change management functions, ensuring the effective operation and continuous improvement of technology services across the Bank.

The role serves as a key Subject Matter Expert for Perenna's technology landscape, providing leadership, technical oversight, and operational governance across all business-critical systems and platforms.

The position reports directly to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and plays a critical role in delivering secure, resilient, and high-performing technology services that support the Bank's strategic objectives.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the definition, implementation, and ongoing governance of the Service Transition framework, ensuring the seamless introduction of new and changed services into production whilst minimising operational risk and service disruption.
• Collaborate with internal technology teams and third-party service providers to plan, coordinate, and execute service transitions, ensuring clear accountability, effective handover, and operational readiness.
• Manage the end-to-end change management process across environments and managed services, working closely with service providers and support teams to deliver changes safely, efficiently, and in accordance with agreed service levels and governance standards.
• Conduct regular service performance reviews with key suppliers and technology partners, driving transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement against contracted SLAs, KPIs, and operational objectives.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Internal Audit, and external auditors to ensure adherence to organisational controls, regulatory requirements, and industry best practices across service management, service transition, change management, and operational governance.
• Develop, monitor, and report on meaningful service delivery metrics and operational performance indicators, providing actionable insights that support informed decision-making and continual enhancement of service quality and customer outcomes.
• Champion a culture of continuous service improvement, proactively identifying opportunities to enhance operational effectiveness, service reliability, automation, resilience, and user experience across the technology estate.
• Foster strong stakeholder relationships across business, technology, and supplier communities, ensuring services remain aligned to business priorities, regulatory expectations, and evolving customer needs.
• Own and run Change Advisory Board (CAB) regularly and as appropriate for business needs of Perenna Bank.

Skills and experience.

• Demonstrable expertise in Service Delivery and Service Transition, gained through hands-on experience in complex technology environments encompassing SaaS platforms, hosted services, and multi-component ecosystems. Proven ability to manage end-to-end support services and lead the successful transition of solutions into live production environments.
• Strong understanding of business-critical applications within regulated financial services environments, ideally within banking, lending, or mortgage operations. Experience supporting mortgage origination, servicing, or related lending platforms would be particularly valuable.
• Deep knowledge of modern cloud and digital workplace technologies, including Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, Azure Active Directory (Entra ID), Intune, and AWS cloud services. Strong understanding of SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments, including AWS identity and access management, networking, security, monitoring, and operational best practices that support resilient, secure, and scalable business services.
• Proficient in leveraging and optimising service management, configuration management, and collaboration platforms, with practical experience of tools such as Jira, Confluence, OpsGenie, and Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) to improve service performance, governance, and operational efficiency.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL v3/v4 Service Management principles, particularly across Service Delivery, Service Transition, Change Management, Configuration Management, and Continual Service Improvement. Formal certification is advantageous but not essential; a proven ability to apply ITIL best practices in a practical operational setting is key.
• The role is responsible for managing people. Whilst we’re happy to consider people who don’t have formal people management experience, you’ll need to demonstrate a strong capability for people management, effective leadership skills and be deeply committed to developing your skills as a manager.

Rewards & Benefits at Perenna

You’ll earn a competitive base salary, with a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• 30 days of annual leave, with Public Holidays on top.
• 10% company contribution to your pension
• Fully comprehensive private healthcare cover for you and your family. Our plan includes cancer cover and mental healthcare, access to a GP 24/7 and additional wellbeing benefits. You pay no contributions to any healthcare cover, just tax on the benefit in kind through payroll each month (no P11Ds to worry about).
• Security for life events through our Income Protection Scheme (if you’re incapacitated and can’t work) and our Life Assurance Plan (worth 8 times your salary).
• We offer support through our confidential Employee Assistance Programme whenever you need it, and access to fully trained Mental Health First Aiders across the company.
• Commitment to your development, with access to training and learning opportunities to support your growth and access to thousands of free to use courses through our on-demand learning platform.
• Cycle To Work bike loan scheme (salary sacrifice) and Electric Vehicle lease scheme (salary sacrifice)

Our roles are hybrid. This means although we don’t expect you to be in the office every day, there are some things that are just better done together – in-person team training, collaborating on new processes and improvement to how we do things, informal chats and in-person get togethers to explore new things or get a wider perspective on what’s going on. We want to make the balance work between working at home and at the office that best enables efficiency, connection and collaboration. You will agree with your manager the in-office working balance for this role.

Things you should know.

We're a regulated bank, so if you're successful, our pre-employment process will include ID verification, a DBS records check, adverse credit checks (not scoring) and employment history referencing before your start date is confirmed.

All applicants need to be fully eligible to work in the UK without any restrictions. We can't support Visa sponsorship.

Things that matter to us all.

The fantastic people we have here at Perenna come from a very wide range of backgrounds and communities, but we all share the same belief that mortgages should be better, and we all want to make that happen together. We’re passionate and proud of our unique proposition, our products and our mission. We collaborate and we support each other, and our culture is inclusive and open. Diversity of all kinds is valued and respected here, and whatever your background, your voice will be heard. That’s not just because it’s the right thing to do – we believe our diversity makes us better for our customers and helps us think big about our goals.

If you need any accommodation or adjustment to participate in our selection process, please let us know, and we’ll make it happen.