Manager, Service Management Engineering

Overview
Customer Operations plays a critical role in ensuring Vocalink delivers secure, reliable, and high performing payment services.
The Customer Operations Manager is responsible for the day to day, end to end operational delivery of assigned services, acting as an operational Subject Matter Expert (SME). The role ensures services are delivered in line with contractual, regulatory, and customer expectations, with a strong focus on service stability, incident management, risk control, and continuous improvement.
Role
The Customer Operations Manager acts as the primary operational contact and escalation point for schemes and customers, owning service performance and ensuring issues, risks, and changes are managed effectively.
The role requires the ability to interpret complex technical issues and translate them into clear, business focused communication, representing Vocalink confidently with customers, schemes, and industry stakeholders as required.
Key Responsibilities
Responsibilities include:
• Owning end to end operational service delivery for assigned services, ensuring performance meets contractual obligations, SLAs and regulatory requirements.
• Acting as the primary operational escalation point, taking ownership of incidents through to resolution, including leading major incident communications and reporting suitable for external publication to schemes, customers and regulators.
• Ensuring all contractual customer communications (incidents, changes, maintenance) are delivered accurately and within agreed timeframes.
• Acting as the operational SME, providing authoritative guidance on service behaviour, risk, and customer impact, including translating technical issues into clear business messaging.
• Building and maintaining senior operational relationships with schemes, customers and stakeholders, acting as a trusted point of contact.
• Managing the operational impact of change and release activity, ensuring risks are identified, assessed and mitigated.
• Driving service improvements and risk mitigation activity, informed by incident trends, root cause analysis, and customer feedback.
• Ensuring operational risks, audit actions and control requirements are actively managed and delivered within agreed timelines.
• Producing and presenting service performance reporting and operational insights to stakeholders and senior management.
All About You / Experience
Essential
• Strong experience in a customer facing service delivery or service management role within a complex operational environment.
• Experience within financial services or payments, with an understanding of service criticality and regulatory expectations.
• Proven track record of building, owning and developing relationships with senior external stakeholders, including schemes and customers.
• Proven experience acting as a primary escalation point for incidents, including ownership of customer communication.
• Proven ability to make informed decisions under pressure, balancing customer impact, risk and service priorities.
• Experience producing high quality major incident reports / post incident outputs suitable for external customers, schemes and regulators.
• Ability to interpret technical information and translate it into clear, business focused communication.
• Experience working with and negotiating SLAs, service levels and performance expectations.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence, challenge and build credibility at multiple levels.
• Experience working in regulated and audit driven environments, with an understanding of risk and control requirements.
• Commercial awareness, including understanding of contracts and service obligations.
• Experience of service management frameworks or operational delivery models (e.g. ITIL).
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of outcomes, and operate effectively with minimal supervision.
Desirable
• ITIL certification.
• Knowledge of ISO20000 or similar service management standards.
• Previous experience in a similar operational or service delivery management role within payments or financial services.

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;


• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;


• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and


• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.