Service Operations Manager

Job Purpose

Responsible for leading the 24×7 operational performance, reliability, and support of all IT services delivered to internal stakeholders, airline partners, and customers of ISA Aviation. Oversees incident, problem, and service request management, operational monitoring, customer communications, and service performance governance while driving the transformation toward a proactive, automated, and customer-centric service model that identifies and resolves issues before they impact business operations or customer experience.

Key Result Responsibilities

• Manage and ensure the timely resolution of all incidents and service requests within the defined SLA, maintaining zero overdue cases and minimizing operational disruption. 


• Coordinate and oversee escalations to engineering teams, driving effective service restoration and ensuring prompt resolution of complex technical issues.


• Drive and enhance proactive monitoring capabilities across the organization, increasing proactive detection rates from 20% to at least 90% through the effective utilization of monitoring, observability, infrastructure, and security platforms.


• Lead automation-first service delivery initiatives by implementing self-service solutions, automated access provisioning, chatbot support, and workflow automation to improve efficiency, user experience, and service responsiveness.


• Conduct root cause analysis of recurring incidents and drive permanent corrective actions to eliminate repeat failures, improve service stability, and reduce operational disruptions.


• Ensure all identified problems are formally tracked and assigned to the appropriate engineering team or vendor through linked Jira tickets or issue records, maintaining full visibility, accountability, and resolution ownership.


• Implement and maintain a comprehensive Service Catalog and CMDB to enable rapid dependency mapping, root cause analysis, and business impact assessment.


• Serve as the primary operational point of contact for customers, internal stakeholders, and third-party vendors, ensuring clear, timely, and effective communication during service delivery and incident management activities.


• Provide proactive incident communications and periodic service performance reporting to customers, internal leadership, and executive management, ensuring transparency, stakeholder alignment, and informed decision-making.


• Develop and maintain disaster recovery readiness by ensuring Service Hub engineers are trained on DR activation procedures and that comprehensive runbooks, operational playbooks, and test scenarios are available for all critical systems.


• Plan, coordinate, and execute periodic disaster recovery tests, ensuring a minimum of one end-to-end DR exercise per year for each critical system to validate recovery capabilities and business continuity preparedness.


• Build and maintain a comprehensive Knowledge Base integrated with chatbot support.


• Reduce new engineer onboarding time by ≥ 50% through standardized troubleshooting guides and SOPs.


• Lead the end-to-end onboarding and operational readiness of new OTA integrations, ensuring all required access, configurations, monitoring, and support processes are established within defined SLA.


• Coordinate with internal and external stakeholders to ensure new OTA integrations are fully operational, monitored, and supported, enabling seamless service delivery and business continuity.


• Chair daily operations meetings and SLA monitoring reviews with NOC, SOC, IT Support, and Application teams.


• Deliver structured monthly service review reports including uptime, SLA performance, incident trends, and improvement actions.

People Management: 

• Provides direction, coaching and guidance to team members for their career and professional development.  


• Creates a conducive working environment to build and sustain a performance driven, engaged, and committed team.


• Ensures people management responsibilities are handled effectively in line with company procedures.

Qualifications (Academic, training, languages)

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.


• Strong knowledge of IT Service Management (ITSM) principles and best practices based on the ITIL framework, including Incident, Problem, Change, and Service Request Management. 


• Good understanding of advanced ITSM methodologies, service governance, continual service improvement, and service delivery management practices. 


• Knowledge of project management principles, methodologies, and frameworks, including project planning, stakeholder management, risk management, and delivery governance. 


• Working knowledge of cloud platforms, monitoring and observability tools, endpoint management solutions, and modern infrastructure technologies, including Datadog, AWS, Azure, Microsoft Intune, and related technologies.


• Strong understanding of airline and travel technology environments, including Passenger Service Systems (PSS), reservations, inventory management, check-in, departure control systems, and the operational impact of service disruptions on airline operations and revenue. 


• Familiarity with aviation operational domains such as Flight Operations, Crew Management, Airport Operations, and airline partner service level obligations. 


• Strong understanding of IT service automation, including self-service portals, automated fulfillment workflows, CMDB administration, service catalog management, and scripting or automation technologies to reduce manual effort. 


• Demonstrated operational ownership with end-to-end accountability for service reliability, incident resolution, and continuous service improvement in a 24x7 production environment. 

Work Experience

• Minimum 10-12 years of experience in Service Operations, Network Operations Center (NOC), IT Service Management, or a similar role within a software product, SaaS, airline technology, or technology services environment.


• Practical experience using IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms such as Freshservice, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or similar tools. 


• Hands-on experience with modern observability, monitoring, and alerting platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Kibana, or equivalent, including dashboard configuration, performance monitoring, and proactive issue detection. 


• Hands-on experience with Jira and Confluence for ticket management, escalation tracking, engineering coordination, documentation, runbook development, and knowledge base administration. 


• Experience working within DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or engineering-led service operations environments, with exposure to API-based integrations, workflow automation, and service reliability practices. 


• Experience with endpoint and synthetic monitoring solutions such as Microsoft Intune, Radar, Site24x7, or equivalent tools for proactive service monitoring and user experience management.


• Demonstrated experience managing SLAs, major incident response, service restoration, and engineering-integrated operations, with strong understanding of Agile development methodologies.


• Experience coordinating with external technology vendors, OTA (Online Travel Agency) partners, distribution partners, and third-party service providers in support, operational, or integration capacities.