Lead Operational Excellence Specialist

Are you an operational leader who has run production environments and transformed how services operate at scale?

Do you combine hands-on engineering credibility with the ability to shape strategy, influence senior stakeholders and drive lasting operational improvements?

In this role, you will lead the evolution of operational excellence across our mission-critical platforms and services. You will work closely with engineering, service owners and senior leadership to improve resilience, strengthen governance, and embed a culture of continuous improvement grounded in real-world operations.

This role is critical to ensuring our licence to operate, enabling our teams to deliver stable, secure and high-performing services to our global community.

What you will do

You will:

• Shape and drive the operational excellence strategy, grounded in real operational experience and aligned to business priorities and regulatory expectations
• Lead governance and operational forums, translating operational data and insights into clear, actionable recommendations for senior leadership
• Define and evolve operational KPIs (e.g. Availability, MTTR, MTTC), ensuring they drive the right behaviours across engineering and service teams
• Improve operational visibility, ensuring dashboards and data provide a consistent, reliable view of service health and risks
• Partner with engineering and ITSM teams to embed best-practice operational processes and ways of working
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives, using operational data, incident trends and real-world insights to deliver measurable impact
• Influence without authority, working across a complex organisation to align stakeholders and drive change
• Act as a bridge between engineering and leadership, ensuring operational priorities are understood, owned, and acted upon

What will make you successful

We are looking for a profile that combines operational depth, engineering credibility and transformation capability:

Core experience

• Proven experience running or owning production services or platforms in a complex, mission-critical environment
• Strong background in incident, problem and service management, ideally within a regulated environment
• Demonstrated experience driving operational transformation (not just maintaining or improving processes)
• Solid understanding of ITIL and modern service management practices

Engineering credibility

• Previous hands-on experience in engineering, infrastructure, SRE or operations environments
• Ability to credibly engage with engineering teams and understand real operational challenges
• Experience translating technical realities into operational improvements and governance structures

Operational excellence & governance

• Experience defining and managing operational KPIs and performance frameworks (e.g. availability, MTTR, reliability)
• Proven track record of building or improving operational governance (forums, reporting, accountability models)
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, DORA or similar

Leadership & influence

• Strong servant leadership mindset – able to influence, empower and challenge teams
• Experience leading without direct authority in a matrixed organisation
• Ability to engage senior stakeholders and translate data into clear, compelling narratives

Ways of working

• Comfortable working in Agile environments (JIRA, Confluence familiarity beneficial)
• High level of ownership, autonomy and drive
• Willingness to roll up sleeves and engage at both strategic and operational level

What we offer

We give you the freedom to be yourself. We are creating an environment of unique individuals – like you – with different perspectives on the financial industry and the world. A diverse and inclusive environment in which everyone’s voice counts and where you can reach your full potential.

We are committed to an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation related to accessibility during your application or interview, please contact [email protected] or indicate this in your application.

Please note that this mailbox is not monitored for general recruitment enquiries and should only be used for accessibility or accommodation-related requests (for example related to vision, hearing or neurodiversity).

All requests are confidential and will not affect your candidacy.

Don’t meet every single requirement? At Swift, we are dedicated to building a workplace where people can bring their full selves and ideas to the team, so if you are excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification.