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