Southern Water
Automation Operations Manager
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Job Title: Automation Operations Manager
Closing Date: 2026-07-20
Location: Hybrid (2 days per week in Durrington, Worthing; remote remaining hours)
Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: 37 hours per week, Monday–Friday
Salary: £62,000 (commensurate with skills/experience)
About the Role
Water is the foundation of daily life—yet the industry is progressing towards better measurement, value derivation from data, transformation, and automation. At Southern Water, we are leading this change.
We’re establishing a new Process & Intelligent Automation capability—not just incremental improvements, but exciting, value-driven evolution in AI, automation, and process optimisation that delivers measurable impact for the business, customers, and regulators alike.
As Automation Operations Manager, you will lead the operational strategy for our growing automation and AI estate, ensuring reliability, resilience, and performance while driving sustained value. This senior operational leadership role spans a new capability, empowering you to shape how automation services are governed, delivered, and continuously improved.
Reporting to the Head of Process & Intelligent Automation, you will:
- Lead an external managed service team, responsible for supporting live automation platforms and AI solutions in production.
- Collaborate with Architecture, Engineering, Integration, and Platform teams to embed operational best practices across the solution lifecycle (design to support and retirement).
- Drive service excellence through incident, problem, change, and release management—but go beyond IT ops to build a scalable automation operations model.
This role is about modernising operational rigor—ensuring automation and AI function safely, reliably, and at enterprise scale.
What You’ll Be Responsible For
- Leading operational management of Southern Water’s automation and AI estate, ensuring reliability, security, and performance.
- Managing a third-party managed service team to support production automation solutions and platforms.
- Acting as the senior escalation point for critical incidents, coordinating cross-functional teams to minimise disruption.
- Driving efficiency through structured incident, problem, change, and release management processes.
- Overseeing Power Platform, RPA platforms, Logic Apps, Alteryx workflows, Co-Pilot agents, and foundational automation technologies.
- Proactively monitoring platform health, performance, and service trends to identify risks and improvement opportunities.
- Leading root cause analysis, implementing corrective actions, and improving operational stability at scale.
- Ensuring compliance with SLA targets, regulatory requirements, and governance standards.
- Aligning operational practices with security, data governance, and enterprise technology standards.
- Maintaining operational documentation, runbooks, and audit evidence.
- Supporting operational readiness, deployment support, patching cycles, and release activities.
- Developing operational reporting tools to provide visibility into service health, risk, and performance.
- Identifying process improvements in automation support, tooling, and operational models.
- Accelerating the scaling of automation and AI across Southern Water.
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What You’ll Bring
Essential Requirements
- 10+ years’ experience in:
- Managing large-scale production application environments, particularly SaaS-based platforms.
- IT operations, application support, automation operations, or operational leadership roles.
- 5+ years’ experience managing outsourced/third-party managed service support against demanding SLAs.
- Proven expertise in:
- Operating complex technology environments (owning services, incident management, and performance).
- Supporting automation technologies (e.g., Power Platform, RPA, Logic Apps, workflow orchestration).
- Cloud-based operations (Azure/equivalents), including monitoring dashboards, telemetry, logs, and performance metrics.
- Strong stakeholder management: engaging technical, operational, and executive audiences.
- Experience leading teams and suppliers to deliver high-quality support and reliable outcomes.
- Full grasp of ITIL principles, incident/problem/change/release management.
- Security, access controls, governance, and operational compliance knowledge.
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Desirable Skills
- Certifications: ITIL v4, Microsoft PL-400/600/AZ-104, Blue Prism RPA, ServiceNow.
- Experience with monitoring tools: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Splunk, or Dynatrace.
- AI-enabled services operational monitoring experience.
- Knowledge of enterprise integration platforms, APIs, and cloud-native tools.
- First-hand experience in regulated or critical national infrastructure industries.
- Familiarity with Southern Water’s tech stack:
- ServiceNow, Workday, Maximo, GIS platforms, SAP BO, WaterWorxx.
About Southern Water
We’re undertaking a generational transformation to enhance resilience, sustainability, and customer operations.
Joining now means contributing to organisational evolution as part of a new core capability. Your impact will be real, anti-fragile, and strategic—defining automation operations in a business committed to excellence.
Our mission: to protect and enhance life through water. This role directs that mission by embedding automation excellence into how we operate.
Our Commitment to Diversity
We foster inclusion—encouraging candidates from all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. We never discriminate on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, or any protected characteristic.
Need reasonable adjustments during recruitment? Let us know.
Additional Information
Security Vetting: All successful candidates must provide:
- Proof of eligibility to work in the UK.
- Criminal record check (DBS).
- Employment/education verification for the past three years.
Job Offer Terms:
- Offer is conditional on successful security vetting.
- Failing security requirements or vetting may result in offer withdrawal.
- Some roles may require enhanced checks.
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