Service Manager II

About the Role

Anaplan has an opportunity for a self-motivated Service Manager to join a cross-functional engineering team, playing a pivotal role in supporting the platforms used by hundreds of software engineers and thousands of customers.

Working within the Platform Engineering group that supports Software Development, Ops, Security, and more, you and the team will streamline the delivery of the Anaplan platform — a business-critical, tier-one system that must be highly available with low latency despite complexity and scale.

The Platform Service Management team defines and supports the tools and processes for platform stability and resilience, promoting operational excellence. The team's skills include supporting and developing ITIL and ITSM procedures; incident and problem management; service improvement plans; analysis of operational data; and liaising with technical teams, customer success departments, and customers. We have unparalleled access to our users — they are our colleagues!

This is a hybrid work role: you will be required to be in the York office a minimum of 2 days a week.

Your Impact

As a Service Manager, you will be a pivotal member of a cross-functional engineering team, ensuring the stability and resilience of our business-critical platform. Your primary impact will be driving operational excellence through three pillars:

Leading Incident Management You will command the end-to-end incident management lifecycle. This includes:

• Assessing and triaging technical events impacting the Anaplan platform and customers
• Participating in a 24/7/365 on-call rotation for Incident Management, shared between UK, US, and India service teams
• Supporting the declaration of incidents or outages, managing incident channels, and identifying triage teams
• Managing incident communications per documented procedures and providing ongoing lifecycle reporting to incident partners as investigations and mitigation actions evolve
• Mitigating and containing risk to the business by restoring services to customers as quickly as possible
• Supervising ongoing active incidents, including extended and after-hours critical issues
• Leading, driving, and facilitating all investigation activities related to major platform incidents
• Ensuring workarounds or fixes for known errors are in place and documented as appropriate
• Conducting post-incident reviews (PIRs) for all major incidents and defining problem tasks to reduce the risk of recurrence
• Documenting incident-response compliance with customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Driving Proactive Improvement You will move beyond reactive fixes by:

• Defining, documenting, and refining core service management processes and SOPs based on ITIL/ITSM principles
• Investigating and obtaining root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents
• Managing incident dashboards and generating incident and outage reports for data/trend analytics
• Analysing data, understanding trends, presenting findings, and offering improvements and resolutions to system issues
• Proactively detecting and preventing future problems/incidents and initiating the Problem Management process to allow quicker diagnosis and resolution
• Collaborating with engineers to refine operations and deliver/restore service more efficiently
• Building a knowledge management and sharing environment for incident troubleshooting
• Helping to define and implement ITIL/ITSM practices to effectively manage platform services and improve customer experience

Serving as a Key Liaison You will act as a crucial communication bridge between technical engineering teams, customer success departments, leadership, and customers. Your ability to:

• Write clear, well-documented, and concise internal and customer-facing communications at all times
• Provide clear, concise communications for managing expectations and ensuring SLA compliance
• Advise your manager on any support issues from partners which inhibit restoration of services
• Demonstrate an understanding of, and engagement with, the problem management, service improvement plan, and supportability approach
• Understand the underlying and contributing causes of, and mitigation approach for, production and non-production incidents

Your Skills

• A professional with a solid understanding of ITSM; resolves a wide range of issues in creative ways
• Works on problems of diverse scope where analysis of data requires evaluation of identifiable factors
• Demonstrates good judgment when selecting methods and techniques for obtaining solutions
• Strong interpersonal and effective communication skills
• Can approach and investigate a problem holistically with a "be curious" mentality
• Makes meaningful contributions independently and can successfully complete BAU activities with minimal or no guidance
• High-level understanding of key technologies, regions, and key services, and their use and impact to customers
• Generates constructive input, ideas, and solutions to both individual and team challenges
• Operates with a customer-centric approach
• Networks with internal and cross-functional team members regarding area of expertise
• Has the ability and confidence to collaborate technically in a globally and culturally diverse environment
• Personal accountability to seek out stakeholder partnership and collaboration
• Can share knowledge and train others in their specialist areas
• Can influence other teams during and post incidents

Technologies, Languages, and Frameworks You'll Work With:

• Atlassian products: Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Statuspage, Confluence
• PagerDuty
• Office 365 suite: SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive

Bonus points for experience with:

• Grafana
• Incident Management tooling
• Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs)

Your Qualifications

Essential

• Proven commercial experience in Major Incident Management, Problem Management, and Relationship Management
• Practical experience working with ITIL principles and ITSM frameworks
• ITIL v4 or v3 certification
• Educated to degree level or holds equivalent relevant industry experience

Desirable

• Project Management certification (e.g., Prince 2)
• Major Incident Management (MIM) Professional Level 1 and 2 qualifications, or similar