HEAD OF SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Scandinavian Airlines System SAS

Senior Operational Service Manager – Mission-Critical IT In this role, you will hold end-to-end accountability for service stability, availability, and resilience while leading operational teams responsible for daily service delivery in a high-availability, 24/7 environment. During major disruptions, you will act as Major Incident Manager (MIM), coordinating crisis response, communication, and recovery. You bring strong operational leadership, ITIL and SRE expertise, and a software-engineering mindset that enables proactive improvements, automation, and long-term service resilience. Challenges you will work on You will own the operational performance of mission-critical services, ensuring they meet 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 fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. You will play a key role during critical incidents by leading cross-functional response teams, driving structured incident management, and ensuring clear executive communication. The role also includes shaping and governing a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function with defined escalation paths, on-call models, and operational procedures. Continuous improvement is central, including identifying structural weaknesses, reducing recurring incidents, and translating insights into measurable improvements in availability, recovery, and predictability. You will collaborate 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

Major Incident Management & crisis leadership Act as Major Incident Manager during critical disruptions Lead cross-functional response teams and manage incident command structures Ensure clear executive communication and drive post-incident learning

24/7 operations Ensure effective operation of a 24/7 Operations Centre / NOC-like function Define 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 drive measurable improvements in MTTR, RTO, RPO, and availability Ensure effective use of tools such as ServiceNow and collaborate with engineering teams to embed resilience Promote automation, observability by design, and infrastructure as code

To be successful, we believe you have 7+ years in IT operations, service management, or reliability engineering Experience from mission-critical environments such as aviation, telecom, finance, or large-scale platforms Proven leadership of operational teams responsible for live services Hands-on experience as Major Incident Manager and experience in 24/7 operational environments Strong ITIL knowledge and understanding of SRE principles and distributed cloud/hybrid platforms Ability to engage technically to influence operational and design decisions

You are calm, decisive, and confident under pressure, with strong ownership, a structured and proactive mindset, and the ability to communicate effectively across technical and business stakeholders. Relevant education is beneficial but can be complemented by strong practical experience. Additional information Application deadline: 19 March 2026 (interviews conducted continuously). Start date: As soon as possible. Employment type: Full-time, including a 6-month probation period. Location: Frösundavik (Stockholm), Copenhagen, or Oslo. Onsite presence is expected, with remote work possible upon agreement with your manager.