Service Architect

Location: This is a remote role, offering the flexibility to work virtually from anywhere within the UK.

Contract Type: Permanent

The Opportunity

As a Service Architect, you will design and develop IT services that meet and exceed customer and business expectations. You will be involved throughout the entire IT service lifecycle—from early strategy through design, transition, operation, and continuous improvement—ensuring services align with business goals and requirements. This includes defining service standards, policies, processes, and architectures that guide implementation and operation of the services, while optimising the customer experience and service value. To excel in this role, you will leverage a mix of business analysis and service design skills, technical expertise across multiple domains, strong communication and negotiation capabilities, plus solid project and financial management proficiency.

What You Will Be Doing

• Collaborate with business leaders, architects, and stakeholders to ensure services align with enterprise goals and future state roadmaps. This includes engagement early in new technology request to define strategic direction, shape services requirements and influence solution architecture. The entire service value chain should be considered: engage, plan, design & transition, obtain & build, deliver & support, improve.
• Facilitate ITIL strategy, design, and transition stages of the IT service lifecycle. This includes a focus on aligning IT services with business goals and defining standards, policies, and architectures for implementation and ongoing operations through to continuous improvement (CI).
• Develop customer journey maps to ensure services are designed with optimal customer experience (CX) in mind, incorporating experience-level agreements (XLAs) alongside traditional SLAs.
• Ensure all aspects of service lifecycle are organizationally aligned, requiring business analysis, communication, and strategic planning to ensure IT services meet business needs and expectations now and into the future.

• Manage all service activities, from initial service introduction assessment to creating necessary service artifacts to support the entire service lifecycle including go-live and (CI). This may include business case, design pack, service level agreements, capacity and availability planning, continuity plan, risk & security analysis, change, release, test deployment and so on.
• Represent service and operational interests through all project phases specifying key requirements (functional, non-functional, etc.) and validating compliance with agreed business criticality.
• Assure that solution and service designs correctly account for the current operational environment and business and operational needs. Where a gap is identified, the models, templates, systems, etc. are updated to ensure long-term sustainability.
• Develop and define appropriate resourcing profiles, support costs, and licenses for delivering the required service over the service lifecycle.
• Develop detailed financial models for services, including ROI analysis, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations, and service portfolio investment planning.
• Validate service outcomes, which may be done through balanced scorecard, KPI, KPM, etc. to ensure they meet strategic, operational, technical, architectural, support, and user needs for agreed service delivery and (CI).
• Work with and interface with third-party suppliers, involving agreement, planning, timelines, and quality of deliverables.
• Managing the Early Life Support (ELS) process, with a structured approach to transition new services or systems into live operation, focusing on monitoring, issue resolution, knowledge transfer and performance measurement against a defined criteria. Ensuring a smooth handover with dedicated support teams from Service design/Transition working alongside Operations

What You’ll Bring

• Proven experience in IT Service Management, with deep expertise in ITIL 4 practices across service value system and service lifecycle.
• Exposure and experience in Prince2/PMP project management methodology, creating consistency across projects using an ITIL framework.
• Strong understanding of service governance, service pipeline & catalogue design, balanced scorecard measures, and continuous improvement methods.
• Defining services for running, operating, and changing, translating technical and business requirements into service artifacts including, creating and updating a wide range of service documentation and IT operational process maps. 
• Exposure or experience in Infrastructure, Digital, SaaS, Application (SAP), or Supply Chain technologies.
• ITSM toolsets such as ServiceNow, and exposure to architectural frameworks (e.g., TOGAF).
• Service Management across various disciplines, including managing third-party suppliers in multi-customer and provider environments.
• Strong process competencies with a solid understanding of the Service Value chain.
• Operating within complex operational environments with multiple interdependencies across internal and external matrix organizations.
• Managing conflicting demands and priorities, with a track record of handling the change and transition aspects of multiple simultaneous new/changed IT services.

We Are RS

At RS, we are making amazing happen for a better world.

As a global product and service solutions provider, we help industrial customers operate more efficiently and sustainably. Operating in 33 markets, we support around one million customers worldwide with more than 875,000 stocked products, access to over five million additional products, and a range of service solutions designed to help businesses thrive.

What sets us apart is our people. More than 8,500 colleagues around the world bring technical expertise, digital innovation, and a customer first mindset to everything we do. Guided by our values – We are one team, We deliver brilliantly, We do the right thing, and We make every day better, we're creating an environment where our people can grow, contribute and make a meaningful impact.

Rewards

Our Reward Philosophy is designed to offer market competitive base salaries and provide all of our people the opportunity to participate in a short-term incentive, enabling them to share in the success of the Company.

Our total reward package is more than just the cash; our recognition and benefit offering provide the opportunity for us to recognise, reward and enable the wellbeing of our people at all stages of their journey with RS. Our rewards and benefits vary by country, but include:

• Financial - pension/retirement; life assurance; salary finance (payroll deduction loan scheme)
• Wellbeing - medical plans; health screening; critical illness; disability insurance; holiday / paid time off; employee assistance programme; discounted gym/health club membership
• Lifestyle - transportation assistance schemes (e.g., cycle to work, travel loans, car leasing); onsite catering/lunch vouchers; retail discounts
• Spotlight – our global recognition programme provides a platform to highlight and recognise people role modelling our values

Ready to Make Amazing Happen?

Join over 8,500 colleagues and help us shape the future of our industry. Whoever you are, wherever you are — it all starts here.

Apply now and make RS a part of your journey.

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