About the role

ABOUT THE ROLE The Service Operations Manager is responsible for the reliable, continuous delivery of production monitoring and identity & access management services across LeoVegas. The role combines people leadership of a shift-based engineering team with operational ownership of access governance, ensuring both functions run with consistency, discipline, and clear escalation paths. This is a people-first leadership role. The manager owns team health, shift rhythm, process adherence, and cross-functional coordination, serving as the primary operational liaison between Service Operations and the rest of the Technical Operations department. YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR: Operational leadership & shift management - Own the day-to-day running of a 24/7 shift-based monitoring operation, ensuring handovers are structured and documented. - Maintain shift coverage, manage rota planning, and oversee escalation readiness at all times. - Act as the primary point of escalation for shift engineers during major incidents, supporting war room coordination and live documentation. - Ensure production monitoring activities align with agreed SLAs, detection standards, and escalation procedures. - Review and continuously improve shift handover quality, ensuring knowledge transfer between rotations. Identity & access management oversight - Oversee the onboarding and offboarding process for all company employees, ensuring timely, accurate, and compliant access provisioning. - Ensure periodic access reviews are completed on schedule across all managed systems. - Maintain compliance with internal access policies and relevant regulatory requirements (MGA, UKGC, SPA, and others as applicable). - Act as the accountable owner for access governance, working with the Identity & Access Analysts to continuously improve procedures. Cross-functional coordination - Serve as the primary interface between Service Operations and the Incident Management function, ensuring events are correctly escalated, classified, and handed over. - Coordinate with Change Management on maintenance windows, PR reviews, and go-live readiness activities. - Work closely with the Observability & Engineering Manager to surface operational pain points, monitoring gaps, and manual toil that require tooling or automation investment. - Participate in new market and provider onboarding processes, maintaining checklists and ensuring regulatory notification requirements are met. People & performance management - Lead regular 1:1s, performance conversations, and development planning for all direct reports. - Manage team wellbeing and engagement, with particular attention to the challenges of shift-based working patterns. - Identify training needs and support certification or skills development where appropriate. - Onboard new team members effectively, maintaining and improving onboarding documentation. Process & governance - Own and maintain operational runbooks, escalation playbooks, and standard operating procedures for the Service Operations team. - Ensure all monitoring activities comply with the Datadog governance standards set by the Observability & Engineering team. - Support certification readiness activities by ensuring operational processes meet required compliance standards. - Conduct or facilitate post-shift reviews following major incidents, feeding findings into the wider incident management process. OUR SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE THE FOLLOWING: The essentials skills you bring to the team: - Proven experience managing a shift-based operations or NOC team in a 24/7 environment. - Strong understanding of production monitoring principles, event management, and incident escalation. - Experience managing identity & access management processes, including onboarding, offboarding, and access reviews. - Demonstrated ability to lead and develop a team of 8+ people across multiple disciplines. - Familiarity with ITIL frame