HEAD OF SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Senior Operational Service Manager – Mission-Critical IT

Are you motivated by stability, resilience, and high-impact operations? Do you thrive in complex environments where availability, reliability, and rapid response are essential? We are looking for a Senior Operational Service Manager to lead and continuously improve the delivery of mission-critical IT services within a high-availability, 24/7 operational landscape.

In this role, you will hold end-to-end accountability for service stability, availability, and resilience while providing leadership to operational teams responsible for daily service delivery. During major disruptions, you will act as Major Incident Manager (MIM), leading crisis coordination, communication, and recovery efforts.

You combine strong operational leadership with ITIL and SRE expertise and bring a software-engineering mindset that enables proactive improvements, automation, and long-term service resilience.

Challenges you will work on:

You will take ownership of the operational performance of mission-critical services, ensuring they meet agreed SLAs, SLOs, and business expectations. The role includes leading distributed teams across geographies and time zones, strengthening collaboration between operations, engineering, vendors, and business stakeholders, and building a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

You will play a key role in crisis situations, leading cross-functional response teams, driving structured incident management, and ensuring effective executive communication. The role also includes shaping and governing a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function with clear escalation paths, on-call models, and operational procedures.

Continuous improvement is central, with responsibility to identify structural weaknesses, reduce recurring incidents, and translate insights into measurable improvements in availability, recovery, and operational predictability. You will work closely with engineering teams to ensure operability and resilience are built into solutions while promoting automation, observability, and infrastructure as code.

Key Responsibilities

Operational service ownership & availability

• End-to-end accountability for mission-critical IT services

• Ensure high availability, reliability, and performance aligned with SLAs and business expectations

• Act as senior escalation point for risks impacting safety, revenue, or customer experience

• Oversee availability management, capacity planning, resilience, and failover strategies
  
  

Leadership

• Provide direction and priorities for distributed operational teams

• Lead teams across time zones, including offshore delivery units

• Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement

• Establish clear onshore/offshore interfaces and handover models

• Support competence development and long-term capability building

• Foster collaboration between operations, engineering, vendors, and business stakeholders
  
  

Major Incident Management & crisis leadership

• Act as Major Incident Manager during critical disruptions

• Lead cross-functional response teams under pressure

• Establish and manage incident command structures

• Ensure clear and business-relevant executive communication

• Drive post-incident learning and corrective actions
  
  

24/7 operations & operations centre leadership

• Ensure effective operation of a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function

• Define and govern shift and on-call models, escalation paths, and operational procedures

• Balance service quality, response speed, resilience, and cost efficiency
  
  

Continuous improvement

• Evolve operational processes aligned with ITIL and SRE practices

• Identify recurring issues and structural improvement opportunities

• Drive measurable improvements in MTTR, RTO, RPO, availability, and predictability

• Ensure effective use of supporting tools such as ServiceNow

• Collaborate with engineering teams to embed operability and resilience

• Promote automation, observability by design, and infrastructure as code

To be successful, we believe you have:

Professional experience

• 7+ years in IT operations, service management, or reliability engineering

• Experience from mission-critical, high-availability environments (e.g., aviation, telecom, finance, large-scale platforms)

• Proven leadership of operational teams responsible for live services

• Hands-on experience acting as Major Incident Manager or similar crisis leadership role

• Experience governing 24/7 operational environments
  
  

Technical & methodological competence

• Strong knowledge of ITIL practices (Incident, Problem, Change Management)

• Solid understanding of SRE principles and modern distributed systems across cloud and hybrid platforms

• Ability to engage technically to influence operational and design decisions
  
  

Personal attributes

• Calm, decisive, and confident under pressure

• Strong ownership and accountability mindset

• Structured and proactive with a continuous improvement focus

• Clear communicator across technical and non-technical audiences

• Trusted leader who creates confidence in both steady-state operations and crisis situations
  
  

Relevant academic education is beneficial but can be complemented by strong practical experience. The role requires close collaboration with teams and a presence aligned with operational needs.

Our Culture at SAS

At SAS, we are dedicated to caring for each other, delighting our travelers, and driving the transformation towards sustainable aviation. As a future colleague on our team, you’ll join a culture where we work collaboratively towards common goals, recognize each other's contributions, and celebrate successes. Our focus is on safe, sustainable, and punctual execution, and we are committed to protecting our planet while transforming SAS for the future. This is an empowering workplace where you can thrive, grow, and take ownership of your work. Join us at SAS and be part of shaping the future of aviation! 

Additional information

• Deadline for application: 19/03/2026. Please send us your CV as soon as possible, as interviews are conducted continuously, and the position may be filled before the application deadline. Note that we are not able to handle any applications that are sent by email, due to GDPR regulations. 
• Desired start date: As soon as possbile.
• Position: Fulltime (100%) starting with a 6-month probation period.
• This position can be based in Frösundavik, Solna (Stockholm), Copenhagen, or Oslo, and you will be expected to work onsite. Remote work may also be possible depending on the agreement with your manager.

Is this you? If so, come fly with us!

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