Senior IT Service Manager

LOCATION

Bucharest, Romania | Hybrid

COLLABORATION TYPE: B2B

DESCRIPTION

Job Summary

We are seeking a Senior IT Service Manager to lead production service delivery for the CCP.RO account. The role safeguards the availability, stability and performance of live services, coordinates incident resolution and maintenance, and ensures that support and release processes are defined, followed and improved. It combines direct management of support staff with coordination across client teams and technology providers.

You will own service governance within the agreed scope, monitor contractual commitments and penalty exposure, handle escalations, and communicate service performance and risks to business stakeholders. Working closely with the Development and Delivery team, you will turn production feedback into improvements and ensure that new releases can be supported reliably. More than 10 years of overall IT experience, including substantial responsibility for live production systems, is required.

Main tasks of the role include

• Production service ownership and process governance

• Manage day-to-day service delivery against agreed scope, service hours (07:00–21:00 CET, Monday–Friday), business priorities and operational responsibilities.

• Define, document and enforce incident, problem, request, maintenance, change and release workflows, with clear ownership, escalation paths and auditable records.

• Maintain service documentation, dependency maps, support procedures and a prioritized service improvement plan.

• Lead major incident coordination: assess business impact, mobilize L2 and L3 specialists, drive recovery actions and escalate promptly when service commitments are at risk.

• Provide timely stakeholder updates covering impact, recovery progress, next actions and the next communication time; validate recovery with the relevant service owners.

• Drive post-incident reviews, root cause analysis, known-error and workaround records, and permanent corrective actions through to verified closure.

• Monitor SLA and operational-level commitments, availability, response and restoration times, backlog ageing and recurring incidents using reliable service data.

• Anticipate breaches, coordinate recovery plans, and maintain the evidence needed to assess contractual penalties or service credits with account and commercial management.

• Prepare service reviews that explain performance, breaches, risks, dependencies and improvement actions, with named owners and deadlines.

• Plan and coordinate corrective, adaptive, evolutive and preventive maintenance; prioritize fixes, patches and enhancements with business owners and the evolution team.

• Coordinate the release calendar, dependencies, maintenance windows, risk assessments, approvals and stakeholder communications through the agreed change governance.

• Ensure production readiness: test evidence, acceptance criteria, deployment and rollback plans, monitoring, runbooks, knowledge transfer and available L2 and L3 coverage.

• Contribute to go or no-go decisions within the agreed authority, oversee post-release validation and early support, and review failed changes and release-related incidents.

• Directly manage support staff and coordinate L2 and L3 contributors across teams; set priorities, allocate work, coach staff and monitor delivery and performance.

• Manage support rotations, rosters, handovers, leave cover and backup arrangements against agreed service hours; ensure access to specialists and clear escalation ownership.

• Maintain skills coverage, onboarding, runbooks and knowledge transfer to reduce dependency on individuals and preserve continuity during staffing changes.

• Build productive relationships with business stakeholders, service desk, application, infrastructure, networking, security, development, QA and supplier teams.

• Represent service operations in operational and management forums; communicate technical issues in business terms and resolve conflicting priorities constructively.

• Feed recurring incidents, support effort, capacity risks and user feedback into the evolution backlog; track agreed changes through delivery and acceptance into support.

• Coordinate monitoring and alerting improvements, availability and capacity reviews, backup and restore readiness, and disaster recovery exercises with technical owners.

• Ensure security, access and audit requirements are reflected in support processes; coordinate production remediation with security and compliance teams.

• Use incident and release trends to prioritize automation and reliability improvements, balancing service risk, support capacity and operational cost.

Qualifications and Competencies

• More than 10 years of overall IT experience, including substantial experience delivering, transitioning, maintaining and supporting live business-critical systems in production.

• Strong, demonstrable experience as an IT Service Manager, Service Delivery Manager, Production Support Manager or in a comparable role with responsibility for service outcomes.

• Strong service and release management experience, including major incidents, problem management, maintenance planning, change governance and transition into operational support.

• Practical knowledge of ITIL or a comparable service management framework, and a track record of defining and enforcing workable processes across multiple teams.

• Experience managing SLAs, service reporting, contractual breach exposure, penalties or service credits, and evidence-based service improvement plans.

• Proven direct team leadership and cross-team coordination, including L2 and L3 workload management, support rotations, capacity planning, coaching and knowledge continuity.

• Strong business stakeholder relationship management, organizational networking, negotiation and conflict resolution skills; ability to influence teams outside direct reporting lines.

• Professional fluency in spoken and written English, including incident communications, service reviews and presentations to business and management stakeholders.

• Sound technical understanding of enterprise applications and their dependencies across operating systems, databases, middleware, integrations, infrastructure and cloud or container platforms.

• Proficiency with ITSM tools such as Jira Service Management, ServiceNow or equivalent, and with dashboards, service metrics, knowledge bases and management reporting.

• Structured analytical judgement, clear accountability and calm decision-making under pressure; ability to prioritize by business impact, risk and urgency.

• Understanding of operational resilience, monitoring, access controls and recovery objectives, including recovery time and recovery point objectives.

• A degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant professional experience.

• Availability for out-of-hours escalations during major incidents and planned production releases, as required by the agreed service arrangements.

Nice to have

• ITIL certification or a comparable recognized IT service management qualification is a strong plus; advanced service, incident or release management qualifications are advantageous.

• Experience in financial services, capital markets, central counterparty clearing, risk or other regulated environments supporting critical business operations.

• Familiarity with IBM i or AS/400, IBM WebSphere, Linux, virtual machines, Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, and monitoring platforms such as Prometheus and Grafana.

• Working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, firewalls, proxies and load balancing sufficient to assess connectivity issues, understand service impact and coordinate specialist troubleshooting.

• Experience improving service delivery through automation, DevOps collaboration, service integration across suppliers, or transition and knowledge-transfer programmes.