Job Title: Service Manager
Location: Edinburgh or Alderley Park
Working Style: Hybrid 50% home/office based
Contract Type: Permanent
Closing date: 3rd of March 2026
Overview:
We’re looking for an experienced Service Manager with a strong focus on Service Transition to ensure new and changed services are safely and smoothly introduced into our live environment.
You’ll play a key role in making sure technology changes are production‑ready and handed over effectively to operational teams. Working across projects, programmes, engineering, and infrastructure, you’ll help ensure every service meets the required standards, governance, and readiness checks expected in a regulated environment.
This is an excellent opportunity for someone who enjoys working between delivery and operations, bringing strong service management skills, confident stakeholder engagement, and the ability to coordinate across multi‑disciplinary teams.
About the role:
You will act as the bridge between our change delivery teams and our run/operational owners, ensuring every service transitions smoothly into BAU support. You won’t have direct reports, but you will influence a wide range of stakeholders across projects, engineering, and infrastructure.
* Lead the service transition process for new or changed services, ensuring they are fit for production and meet required acceptance criteria.
* Work closely with project managers, programme managers, scrum masters, technical owners, principal engineers, and infrastructure managers to ensure operational readiness.
* Coordinate service readiness, including DR testing, documentation, support model definition, and handover to second‑line support teams.
* Run and embed the appropriate governance, ensuring all pre‑live requirements are met and signed off.
* Represent Service Management within change, ensuring accountability, alignment, and clear communication across all stakeholders.
* Evaluate solutions and project outputs against service acceptance criteria and ensure all risks, controls, and dependencies are identified and managed.
* Facilitate the ongoing development of Service Management processes, working collaboratively with teams to support continual improvement.
About you:
You’ll bring a blend of practical experience, technical understanding, and the ability to influence and support teams across a diverse change environment. You understand what good looks like in service transition and can confidently lead teams through the readiness process.
* Strong technical background; able to understand architecture and design documentation.
* Experience of running service transition governance and safely transitioning services into production.
* ITIL‑qualified with solid understanding of the Service Transition lifecycle.
* Knowledge of sourcing processes (RFPs, ITTs, SOWs) and contract negotiation/management.
* Good understanding of SLAs, OLAs and underpinning contracts.
* Proficient in business analysis techniques and interpreting service/operational data.
* Skilled in gathering, analysing and presenting transition and readiness metrics.
* Experienced in risk assessment, impact analysis and Business Continuity considerations.
* Strong presentation and stakeholder communication skills.
* Able to lead transition of services into live operation, working closely with Change Managers and technical teams.
If you think you would be a great fit for our team at Royal London but don’t meet all the requirements of the role, please get in touch as your application will still be considered.
About Royal London
We’re the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions and investment company, offering protection, long-term savings and asset management products and services.
Our People Promise to our colleagues is that we will all work somewhere inclusive, responsible, enjoyable and fulfilling. This is underpinned by our Spirit of Royal London values; Empowered, Trustworthy, Collaborate, Achieve.
We've always been proud to reward employees by offering great workplace benefits such as 28 days annual leave in addition to bank holidays, an up to 14% employer matching pension scheme and private medical insurance. You can see all our benefits here - Our Benefits
Inclusion, diversity and belonging
We’re an Inclusive employer. We celebrate and value different backgrounds and cultures across Royal London. Our diverse people and perspectives give us a range of skills which are recognised and respected – whatever their background.