IT Service Operations Manager

Location

Dubai, UAE

About the role

The manager, IT service operations owns the operational backbone of the infrastructure & cybersecurity function. This role leads service desk operations, incident management, change management, monitoring, and field support across the organisation. It is a hands-on leadership role focused on professionalising operations, embedding ITIL discipline, and bringing measurable improvement to how the business experiences IT.

Key responsibilities

IT service management

• Own the end-to-end ITSM framework, ensuring consistent service delivery across all locations
• Establish a clear L1/L2 service model with structured ticket routing
• Drive continual service improvement using data, metrics, and feedback loop

Incident management

• Own the major incident management process, formal escalation paths, named incident commanders, bridge protocols, and structured executive communications
• Ensure mandatory root cause analysis on all P1 and P2 incidents within agreed timeframes
• Establish ticket priority discipline and bring P1 volumes to industry norms
• Drive proactive incident detection through monitoring

Change management

• Own the ITIL-aligned change management process, including Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Technical Advisory Board (TAB)
• Ensure changes are presented by business or application owners with proper documentation, impact assessment, and rollback plans
• Enforce multi-party approvals and structured change governance

Service desk & field support

• Lead 24/7 service desk operations and regional field support
• Ensure consistent standards, tooling, and service quality across all locations
• Build a comprehensive knowledge base capturing institutional knowledge
• Design and launch self-service capabilities to reduce ticket volume

Monitoring & operational visibility

• Centralise monitoring and alerting under a single team
• Build and maintain operational dashboards for leadership visibility
• Establish weekly operational reporting cadence with consistent KPIs (SLA, MTTR, incident counts, change success rates)

Team leadership

• Lead a team across service desk, field support, and operations
• Build a culture of professionalism, accountability, and service excellence
• Coach, develop, and grow team members through certification and clear growth paths

Required experience & qualifications

Essential

• 8–12 years of progressive experience in IT service operations, ITSM, or IT infrastructure operations
• At least 3–5 years leading service desk, operations, or ITSM teams
• Demonstrated experience implementing or maturing ITIL-aligned practices, particularly incident, change, and problem management
• Hands-on experience with enterprise ITSM platforms
• Experience with any multinational corporation is mandatory
• Strong experience with monitoring and observability tooling
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or related field
• ITIL v4 Foundation certification (Managing Professional preferred)
• Excellent written and spoken English