Senior Manager: Scheduling

Requisition Details

Job Title: Senior Manager – Scheduling & Batch Automation

Closing Date - 26 October 2026

Job Purpose

Provide strategic, technical, and operational leadership for the organisation’s enterprise scheduling, workload orchestration and batch automation capability, ensuring critical business processing is executed reliably, securely, efficiently and within agreed service levels.

Job Responsibilities

The role is accountable for the availability, resilience, performance, governance, automation and lifecycle management of enterprise scheduling platforms and associated services. It drives the evolution from traditional batch scheduling toward modern workload automation and orchestration, reducing manual intervention, improving operational resilience and enabling greater levels of automation and self-service across technology teams.

Capability & Platform Ownership

• Own the enterprise Scheduling & Batch Automation capability, including its strategy, roadmap, architecture and service evolution.


• Provide end-to-end accountability for enterprise workload automation and scheduling platforms such as BMC Control-M or equivalent technologies.


• Define standards for scheduling, job orchestration, dependencies, calendars, event-driven processing and automated workflows.


• Develop and maintain a multi-year platform lifecycle and modernization roadmap.


• Ensure appropriate capacity, scalability, availability and performance of the scheduling environment.

Operational Reliability & Resilience

• Ensure critical batch workloads and business processing complete within agreed SLAs and processing windows.


• Maintain high availability and resilience of scheduling and automation platforms.


• Establish monitoring and proactive management of job failures, delays, abnormal executions and processing bottlenecks.


• Ensure appropriate business continuity, disaster recovery and recoverability arrangements.


• Identify critical workload dependencies and reduce operational concentration and single points of failure.


• Drive root-cause analysis and permanent remediation of recurring batch failures.

Automation & Modernisation

• Drive the transition from traditional batch scheduling toward workload automation and orchestration.


• Automate repetitive operational activities and eliminate unnecessary manual intervention.


• Promote API-driven, event-driven and self-service scheduling capabilities.


• Integrate scheduling with DevOps/CI-CD pipelines and infrastructure or application automation where appropriate.


• Identify opportunities to use AI and intelligent automation for failure prediction, anomaly detection, automated remediation and operational optimisation.


• Reduce legacy scheduling complexity and technical debt.

Job Responsibilities Continue

Governance, Risk & Controls

• Establish and enforce enterprise scheduling standards, policies and operating procedures.


• Maintain appropriate segregation of duties and privileged-access controls.


• Ensure scheduling changes comply with change, release and configuration management practices.


• Ensure auditability and traceability of workload changes and executions.


• Manage operational, technology, cyber and regulatory risks associated with the capability.


• Ensure appropriate controls exist for critical financial, regulatory and end-of-day/end-of-month processing.

Service Management & Performance

• Define and monitor service KPIs and operational health measures, including:




• Batch success rates


• SLA adherence


• Critical job failures


• Mean time to restore failed workloads


• Batch-window duration


• Recurring incidents


• Automation levels


• Manual interventions


• Platform availability




• Establish service improvement plans based on operational trends and recurring failure patterns.


• Work closely with Incident, Problem, Change, Availability and Capacity Management functions.

People & Technical Leadership

• Lead and develop a team of scheduling, automation and platform engineering specialists.


• Build sufficient internal technical capability to reduce dependency on individual resources and external vendors.


• Establish succession planning and cross-skilling for critical scheduling technologies.


• Define technical competency frameworks and development plans for the team.


• Provide technical and operational leadership during major incidents and critical processing events.


• Foster a culture of automation, engineering discipline, continuous improvement and accountability.

Job Responsibilities Continue

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Partner with application, infrastructure, operations, database, cloud, mainframe, DevOps and business teams.


• Manage relationships with strategic technology vendors and service providers.


• Manage licensing, support agreements, platform costs and commercial optimisation.


• Ensure suppliers deliver against contractual service and support obligations.


• Translate business processing requirements into sustainable workload automation solutions.

Financial & Operational Management

• Own and manage the annual operating budget for the Scheduling & Batch Automation capability, including software licensing, maintenance, infrastructure, vendor services and people costs.


• Develop and manage financial forecasts, budgets and expenditure plans, ensuring alignment with organisational priorities and agreed financial targets.


• Monitor actual expenditure against budget, proactively identifying cost pressures, savings opportunities and financial risks.


• Drive cost optimisation across scheduling platforms, infrastructure, licensing and third-party services while maintaining required levels of resilience and service quality.


• Provide oversight of vendor contracts, licensing, renewals and commercial commitments, ensuring value for money and effective utilisation of contracted products and services.


• Manage the area's operational capacity, resource demand and workforce planning, ensuring sufficient skills and capacity are available to support business-critical services.


• Establish and oversee the area's operational plan, performance objectives, KPIs and service commitments, ensuring effective delivery against agreed targets.


• Maintain oversight of operational risks, incidents, service performance, audit findings and remediation activities, ensuring clear accountability and timely resolution.


• Balance Run, Grow and Transform investment, ensuring sufficient focus on operational stability while funding automation, lifecycle management, technical debt reduction and platform modernisation.


• Produce regular management reporting covering financial performance, operational health, service performance, risk, resource capacity and delivery against strategic objectives.

Essential Qualifications - NQF Level

Preferred Certifications

• BMC Certified Professional / BMC Control-M training and certification


• ITIL


• Cloud technologies & Architectures

Minimum Experience Level

• 10+ years experience within enterprise technology or IT operations.


• 5+ years experience in a leadership or senior management capacity.


• Demonstrated experience managing enterprise scheduling, workload automation, platform engineering or production operations.


• Experience operating technology services in a large, complex and highly regulated enterprise environment.


• Banking or financial-services experience would be advantageous.


• Experience managing business-critical platforms with stringent availability and SLA requirements.


• Demonstrated experience delivering automation, platform modernisation or operational transformation initiatives.

Leadership & Management Competencies

• Strategic leadership and execution


• People leadership and talent development


• Stakeholder and relationship management


• Financial and commercial management


• Vendor and contract management


• Decision-making under operational pressure


• Risk management


• Change and transformation leadership

Technical / Professional Competencies

• Enterprise workload automation and job scheduling


• BMC Control-M or comparable enterprise scheduling technologies


• Distributed and mainframe batch processing


• Linux/Unix and Windows environments


• Mainframe concepts, particularly z/OS batch environments


• Cloud and hybrid infrastructure


• Job dependencies and workload orchestration


• Event-driven automation


• APIs and integration technologies


• Scripting and automation, e.g. PowerShell, Python, Shell


• CI/CD and DevOps principles


• Infrastructure-as-Code concepts


• Monitoring, observability and event management


• ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM platforms


• High availability and disaster recovery


• Cybersecurity and privileged-access principles.