Senior Operational Readiness/ Service Delivery Manager (f/m/d)

For our client we are looking for a Senior Operational Readiness/ Service Delivery Manager (f/m/d).

Role:
Platform Product Operations provides a set of processes and activities involved in managing the products in the production environment and the applications developed and hosted on the platform by tenants.
These activities are clustered into three areas: Change Control, Observe & Monitoring and Support. Platform Product Operations aims to maintain and optimize Platform and services to ensure high availability, performance, scalability and security—while enabling development teams to deliver value quickly and reliably.

Objectives / Tasks:
- Ensure that all platform release candidates are validated and meet production standards before transition
• Management of operational readiness (OR) validation for each platform release candidate
• Verifying compliance with functional (UAT) and operational (OAT) acceptance criteria
• Overseeing all necessary testing, documentation and reviewing processes
- Create a seamless and documented transition-to-production process for multi-platform systems
• Providing designs and management of frameworks for transition-to-production, including governance and sign-off stages
• Preparation and maintaining of relevant change advisory board documentation
• Technical coordination of cross-country, multi-disciplinary stakeholders involved in the release
- Enable sustainable operations after release by properly supporting local operations teams.
• Providing knowledge transfer, training, and detailed documentation for local teams (DE/BE).
• Overseeing handover processes, ensuring local teams are prepared for new releases.
• Coordination of release planning and assistance tailored to local operational contexts
- Facilitate operational stability and readiness in production environments.
• Overseeing creation of runbooks, playbooks, monitoring and configuration setups for each release.
• Actively observing and addressing any issues during transition to production.
• Ensuring the new state of products is stable and functional in production.
-Systematically manage changes from development to operations, ensuring thorough risk management.
• Evaluation and mitigating of risks and dependencies throughout the release process.
• Ensuring observability and readiness in all production environments.
• Outlining processes, resources, and timelines for local production releases.
- Drive continuous improvement in release and operational readiness processes
• Conducting of retrospectives and post-transition reviews, involving feedback from all stakeholders.
• Applying lessons learned to enhance future operational readiness and transition activities

Experience needed:
- 15+ years in IT operations, service delivery or platform engineering, including 5+ years in a senior leadership or coordination role.
- Operational experience in vital environments with applications or systems designed based on state-of-art solutions (containerized and distributed)
- Proven experience managing cross-functional and cross-country teams in a regulated or mission-critical environment (energy, utilities, telco, etc.).
- Strong background in change management, release management and operational governance (ITIL / ISO 20000), shown by project history.
- Proven experience defining, measuring and acting upon SLAs and SLOs
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management and facilitation skills — capable of aligning diverse organizations toward a shared goal.
- Proven working experience with cloud, containerized platforms, observability tools and CI/CD-based delivery pipelines and how it integrates with operations.
- Exposure to ITSM tools inside the Enterprise IT context
- Working experience on leading knowledge handover sessions, workshops, show and tell
- Good understanding of IT infrastructure (network, SAN, virtualization, hyperscale)
- Good understanding of Kubernetes