Principal Service Manager

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: D

CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time

DEPARTMENT: BBC Product Group

LOCATION: Salford or Newcastle - Hybrid

PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: Up to £61,600 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

The Principal Service Manager will act as the subject matter expert for service management within the BBC’s Product Group, Dev Operations function. This role exists to provide deep expertise, hands-on ownership, and continuous improvement of service management practices that underpin the availability, resilience, and quality of the BBC’s digital products.

As an individual contributor, the Principal Service Manager will ensure that core ITSM processes (incident, problem, change, release, service transition, risk, and compliance) are designed, embedded, and continuously optimised across product-led teams. They will serve as the escalation point for complex service issues, provide operational governance and insight through analytics and reporting, and drive automation and process improvements that enable engineering and product teams to deliver audience-facing services safely, rapidly, and at scale.

In doing so, the Principal Service Manager helps ensure the BBC’s digital platforms are resilient, compliant, and aligned with both technology strategy and the Product Development strategy, supporting the BBC’s ability to innovate while maintaining the trust of its audiences.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

As a Principal Service Manager, you’ll join a team that values collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. You’ll play a vital role in safeguarding the resilience and quality of BBC digital services used by millions every day, while helping to shape how we deliver at scale in a product-led organisation. With access to unrivalled training, exposure to cutting-edge technology, and opportunities to influence transformation, this role offers real impact and long-term professional growth.

Your Key Responsibilities And Impact

• Subject Matter Expertise: Act as the SME for service management processes and practices, providing deep technical and operational guidance across incident, problem, change, release, service transition, risk, and compliance.
• Operational Excellence: Lead by example in the design, execution, and continuous improvement of service management processes, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and embedded consistently across product teams.
• Incident and Problem Management: Serve as the escalation point and hands-on lead for complex or major incidents, driving resolution, root cause analysis, and follow-up improvements.
• Service Transition and Onboarding: Own the operational readiness of new or changed services, ensuring effective knowledge transfer, documentation, and smooth transition into live environments.
• Governance and Reporting: Maintain service health metrics, dashboards, and risk registers; deliver insights to the Service Management Manager and stakeholders to inform decision-making.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work directly with engineering, product, and editorial teams to ensure service management practices align with user needs and organisational priorities, balancing governance with agility.
• Continuous Improvement: Identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for automation within service management practices, and lead targeted initiatives to improve quality and reliability.
  
  

Essential Criteria

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Deep ITSM Expertise: Advanced knowledge of ITIL and modern service management practices (incident, problem, change, release, service transition, risk and compliance).
• Hands-On Problem Solving: Demonstrated ability to manage and resolve complex incidents, with strong diagnostic, analytical, and root cause investigation skills.
• Operational Governance: Skilled in applying governance, risk management, and compliance frameworks without creating unnecessary friction for delivery teams.
• Tooling and Analytics: Experience configuring and optimising service management platforms (e.g., ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Jira) and building data-driven insights for service reporting and improvement.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ability to work closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders, translating technical issues into business impacts and ensuring shared accountability for service quality.
• Continuous Improvement Mindset: Proven track record of driving operational excellence through automation, process improvement, and embedding a culture of learning and reliability.
  
  

Desired But Not Required

• Experience in digital media or creative industries – exposure to the unique demands of high-availability, content-driven services where audience experience, brand reputation, and compliance are critical.
• Track record of enabling digital transformation at scale – supporting engineering and product teams in shifting from legacy platforms and processes to cloud-native, automated, and modern service delivery approaches.
• Working within a product-led organisational model – experience embedding service management practices directly into agile product teams, balancing governance with autonomy to support rapid delivery and innovation.
• Partnership with creative and editorial stakeholders – ability to bridge technical service management with non-technical partners in a content or creative environment, ensuring resilience and quality without constraining creativity.
• Service reliability in fast-changing environments – proven capability to design, embed, and optimise operational practices that support innovation cycles, experimentation, and rapid release in digital-first organisations.
  
  

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, along with transferable strengths, we’d love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Contracts of Employment policy. This allows us to discuss any support you may need and assess any risks. Failure to disclose may result in the withdrawal of your offer

Disclaimer

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

For any general queries, please contact: [email protected]

Redeployment

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.