Service Architect (ITIL)
Location: Remote (UK)
Permanent
RS Group is currently seeking a permanent Service Architect to join our team. As a Service Architect, you will design and develop IT services that meet and exceed customer and business expectations. You will be involved throughout the entire IT service lifecycle—from early strategy through design, transition, operation, and continuous improvement—ensuring services align with business goals and requirements. This includes defining service standards, policies, processes, and architectures that guide implementation and operation of the services, while optimising the customer experience and service value. To excel in this role, you will leverage a mix of business analysis and service design skills, technical expertise across multiple domains, strong communication and negotiation capabilities, plus solid project and financial management proficiency.
What you’ll be doing:
1. Collaborate with business leaders, architects, and stakeholders to ensure services align with enterprise goals and future state roadmaps. This includes engagement early in new technology request to define strategic direction, shape services requirements and influence solution architecture. The entire service value chain should be considered: engage, plan, design & transition, obtain & build, deliver & support, improve.
2. Facilitate ITIL strategy, design, and transition stages of the IT service lifecycle. This includes a focus on aligning IT services with business goals and defining standards, policies, and architectures for implementation and ongoing operations through to continuous improvement (CI).
3. Develop customer journey maps to ensure services are designed with optimal customer experience (CX) in mind, incorporating experience-level agreements (XLAs) alongside traditional SLAs.
4. Ensure all aspects of service lifecycle are organizationally aligned, requiring business analysis, communication, and strategic planning to ensure IT services meet business needs and expectations now and into the future.
5. Manage all service activities, from initial service introduction assessment to creating necessary service artifacts to support the entire service lifecycle including go-live and (CI). This may include business case, design pack, service level agreements, capacity and availability planning, continuity plan, risk & security analysis, change, release, test deployment and so on.
6. Represent service and operational interests through all project phases specifying key requirements (functional, non-functional, etc.) and validating compliance with agreed business criticality.
7. Assure that solution and service designs correctly account for the current operational environment and business and operational needs. Where a gap is identified, the models, templates, systems, etc. are updated to ensure long-term sustainability.
8. Develop and define appropriate resourcing profiles, support costs, and licenses for delivering the required service over the service lifecycle.
9. Develop detailed financial models for services, including ROI analysis, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations, and service portfolio investment planning.
10. Validate service outcomes, which may be done through balanced scorecard, KPI, KPM, etc. to ensure they meet strategic, operational, technical, architectural, support, and user needs for agreed service delivery and (CI).
11. Work with and interface with third-party suppliers, involving agreement, planning, timelines, and quality of deliverables.
About you:
In this role, you'll have the opportunity to foster a culture of continual service improvement. Consistently exploring ways to meet stakeholder expectations, enhance customer and user satisfaction, and improve overall effectiveness and efficiency.
What you’ll need:
12. Proven experience in IT Service Management, with deep expertise in ITIL 4 practices across service value system and service lifecycle.
13. Strong understanding of service governance, service pipeline & catalogue design, balanced scorecard measures, and continuous improvement methods.
14. Defining services for running, operating, and changing, translating technical and business requirements into service artifacts including, creating and updating a wide range of service documentation and IT operational process maps.
15. Exposure or experience in Infrastructure, Digital, SaaS, Application (SAP), or Supply Chain technologies.
16. ITSM toolsets such as ServiceNow, and exposure to architectural frameworks (e.g., TOGAF).
17. Service Management across various disciplines, including managing third-party suppliers in multi-customer and provider environments.
18. Strong process competencies with a solid understanding of the Service Value chain.
19. Operating within complex operational environments with multiple interdependencies across internal and external matrix organizations.
20. Managing conflicting demands and priorities, with a track record of handling the change and transition aspects of multiple simultaneous new/changed IT services.
The extras you’ll get:
At RS, as well as the usual employee benefits you’d expect from a FTSE listed company, including annual performance bonus, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, private healthcare, in the UK&I, we’ve just introduced a number of new Family Friendly Policies including:
21. Help for people to take control of ongoing Health conditions such as diabetes or asthma with £500 a year available for monitoring & consultation
22. Support for Neurodiverse colleagues and families with neurodiverse members with needs assessment, diagnosis and post diagnostic support for autism spectrum, ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome
23. Support for Women at different life stages from streamlined fertility support through to diagnosis and monitoring of both endometriosis and menopause
24. Helping our LGBTQ+ community through enhanced coverage for trans colleagues, including voice coaching, facial surgery, and gender confirmation surgery
25. Additions to Fertility coverage including IVF for lesbian couples and information/support around surrogacy and adoption for all.
We are RS
At RS we’ve been solving engineering problems for over 80 years: big ones, small ones, easy and difficult ones. We turn the ‘what ifs’ into the ‘why nots’, the impossible into the possible.
Our purpose? Making amazing happen for a better world.
We offer service and product solutions. We send out a parcel every 2 seconds, to over 130 countries. We provide over 700,000 in-stock and over 3 million unstocked products to more than 1.2 million customers.
We want people like you, as you are curious about things, you like doing things differently and also in a human way with empathy. Because that’s exactly how we partner with people – our customers, suppliers, colleagues and communities – to solve problems.
We’ll also invest in your development and wellbeing – because building a more diverse and inclusive culture, being ethical, responsible, and committed to our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) action plan is at the heart of everything we do.
Come and join us and we’ll help you to think big, do more and unleash your brilliance, so you do amazing things too.
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