Senior Technical Operations Manager

Job Introduction

Selfridges has always been much more than a shop. We’re a social space where everyone is welcome and feels a sense of belonging, a creative playground where culture and commerce collide, and an experimental hub where you can discover the most innovative and sustainable ideas in retail. We’re here to help make the world brighter. And you can be an important part of this. We’ll talk more about the role below, but before we get to that, let’s share with you the good stuff…  

Rewards and benefits 

Life at Selfridges is dynamic, exciting, and always evolving. As well as working with some of the most cutting-edge, iconic and boundary-pushing brands, designers and creatives, we also offer our team members opportunities to help make a positive difference through our network of communities, both within and outside Selfridges. Here are just a few of our rewards and benefits that help make our team experience that bit more extraordinary. 

• Flexible working options to benefit you, your family and your wellbeing that can include part-time, flexi-time, job sharing or hybrid working

• Generous annual leave that increases with length of service 

• Up to five paid volunteering days – from beach cleans to co-ordinating food and clothing donations 

• Family leave that suits your set up including Maternity, Paternity, Adoption, Surrogacy and Shared Parental leave policies 

• Defined pension contribution scheme  

• Generous bonus and/or commission scheme  

• Enviable team member discount including sale previews and double discount days 

• Exclusive local discounts on a range of restaurants, bars, beauticians and entertainment 

• Subsidised gym memberships  

• Annual travel pass and cycle-to-work schemes  

• A sustainable car salary sacrifice scheme 

• Several internal communities to get involved in from our Diversity Board and Green Warriors who are leading the charge on D,E&I and sustainability, to the Wellbeings who are always thinking of new ways to champion healthy minds, bodies and routines for our team members 

• Workplace Options, our confidential team member assistance programme for when life gets tricky or you need a little guidance 

• Access to a wide range of training programmes to help your career development 

Read on to find out how you can play your part in Reinventing Retail… 

Role Responsibility

As a Senior Technical Operations Manager, you will be part of the wider Service Operations SMT managing, co-ordinating and delivering key services and service assurance across different systems and teams that are vital to the success of Selfridges and its customers. You will be Accountable for maintaining and managing a vast portfolio of products and services across multiple 3rd Parties and internal teams/domains, building relationships with key individuals across the business and IT functions to help drive service improvements and best practice, ensure that areas are working together in a consistent and trusted way of working, whilst helping to drive operational improvements across all areas within Tech.

As a Senior Technical Operations Manager, you will:

•Accountable for a specialised team that sit within a domain structured framework, ensuring objectives are created and fully understood by the team and help them progress within their roles as Tech Ops Managers within their domains.

•Carrying out regular 1-2-1’s and ensuring the wellbeing of the team is looked after, as well as ensure any business communications are fed back into the team and are understood.

•Reporting to the Head of Tech for Core Services, you will be responsible for helping to drive operational improvements within the wider Core Service team, as well as collaborate to ensure the strategic goals for both your immediate team as well as the wider team is created, shared and understood, to help drive best practice and underpin the Selfridges strategy.

•Be Accountable for helping to manage escalations from the business and Tech Departments, helping to prioritise these against current workload and help to manage expectations on a daily basis.

•Be Accountable for helping the team to manage problem backlogs that require development fixes, ensuring the priorities are constantly reviewed against the business and customer impact, managing expectations where needed helping to bring together Service Ops and Dev Ops in a collaborative and cohesive way.

•Accountable for helping your team to coordinate forward schedule of change across both internal Tech teams and 3rd Parties across all Domains. Understanding the wider impact across the business as well helping to manage key stakeholder updates for any changes that may carry a high Business/Customer impact.

•Accountable for owning request actions that carry a high impact, such as those off the back of a security audit, or for data requests, or security/data breaches and helping the team drive those forward.  Also responsible to ensure DR actions are carried out where required across all domains / core systems.

•Being a point of escalation for Major incidents across the domains both in hours and out, helping the team to define continual service improvements plans as part of the MI review process.

•Accountable for Service Assurance and reviewing service across domains, service teams as well as your own.  Ensuring 3rd parties are working to the same standard.  Reviewing Suppliers contracts to ensure they are up to date and relevant.  Working closely with SD&T to help define what the service should look like and ensure the longevity of the support model is flexible enough to withstand the ever-changing environment, and helping lead ways of working within domains that improve the service the domains offer the Service Teams.

•Contributing to project or pipeline work across domains.  Working with your team to ensuring Service engagement is happening from an early start and challenging where necessary to ensure support services and teams are being protected and handovers are being planned, as well as support models are in place.

•Supporting the domains with both Technical debt and Risk register actions, ensuring impact is properly understood and where appropriate advertised to the right teams if needed.

•Accountable for ensuring adequate Support is in place for key trading activity or events to ensure a smooth service and operations, including the commend centers over sale.

The Ideal Candidate

How you’ll do it…you will be:

•Have experience and working knowledge with a multitude of retail systems, that will allow you to understand impact to both the business and customer.

•Tenacious and demonstrate a good level of attention to detail with a can do approach.

•Not afraid to take ownership and build relationships with key stakeholders.

•Ability to stay clam under pressure while coming across proactive in communication.

•Able to multitask, show flexibility and prioritise your own workload through excellent planning and organisational skills.

•Able to communicate technical / complex issues in a clear way that is easy to understand to Stakeholders that are not technically minded.

•Creative, not afraid to step out and make your mark, change things for the better.

•Able to manage your time and a team of people effectively.

•Technically minded, and easily understand complex architecture.

•Project Management skills, being able to deliver on time and to budget.

•Familiar with running your own budget and identifying areas to cut costs.

•Think customer first at all times, and be the friendly face into IT

About the Company

Everyone is welcome 

Selfridges is a place where we want everyone to feel a sense of belonging. We embrace every self and are committed to cultivating a diverse and inclusive working culture. We are leading with purpose to not only increase the visibility and recognition of under-represented talent within our organisation, but the wider industry too. Here at Selfridges, everyone is welcome – irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age or disability, we stand by equal opportunities for all.   

Our awards cabinet  

We’re not ones to brag, but since you asked...Selfridges has won the award for The World’s Best Department Store an unprecedented four times at the IGDS awards, with an additional award for the Best Sustainability Campaign. We were also recognised as a ‘Best 25 Big Company to Work For 2020’ as awarded by The Sunday Times. 

Selfridges