Office for National Statistics
IT Service Manager - Cloud Platforms

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The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham).
This role is aligned to ONS hybrid working principles, which are based on attending the office with purpose. The post holder will be expected to contribute to the organisation’s overall 40% office attendance, in line with business and role requirements.
The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.
Job Summary
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.
This IT Service Manager role will be working in Digital Services Directorate. The Platform Enablement service is the entry point, triage, prioritisation and technical leadership capability for Corporate Platform Engineering. It assesses work package definitions from architecture and the business, for delivery across our platform infrastructure estate. As part of wider digital delivery, our aim is to provide 'paved roads' to developer and application teams, accelerating delivery via reusable patterns and underpinning shared services.
Job Description
As a IT Service Manager within the Corporate Platform Engineering branch of Digital Services, you will be part of the Corporate Platform Enablement Team which provides technical oversight, Delivery and Service Management for the Platform Engineering branch of Corporate IT Services. The team will work closely across Divisions and Directorates and will support multiple areas including Compute, Storage and Backup, Build and Deploy, Connectivity and Infrastructure Services, working alongside Engineers, Architects and Delivery Managers to mature the Platform Enablement service which is the 'front door' to platform Engineering for Digital Services.
You will work with technical teams across cloud, infrastructure and connectivity services to define service offerings, standards, support boundaries and shared responsibilities. The role offers opportunities to develop knowledge of platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Broadcom while ensuring services remain reliable, secure and supportable.
You will establish meaningful KPIs and success criteria, using service performance, operational insight and customer feedback to measure effectiveness and drive continual improvement. As a point of contact for customers across the organisation, you will build trusted relationships, champion the customer experience and ensure that services have clear ownership, service-level expectations, operational readiness and escalation routes. You will also provide assurance for change, service transition and major incidents, ensuring that service management considerations are embedded throughout the platform lifecycle.
Responsibilities
As an IT Service Manager, you will:
- Develop and mature the Platform Enablement service, defining its service offer, standards, support boundaries and continual improvement priorities.
- Provide IT service management across public cloud, private cloud, data centre, connectivity and shared infrastructure services.
- Establish meaningful KPIs, service-level expectations and success criteria, using them to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of Platform Enablement.
- Monitor and report on service performance, bringing together service health, availability, change outcomes, operational risks, customer feedback and improvement activity.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with customers and senior stakeholders across the wider organisation, acting as a point of contact for Platform Enablement.
- Champion the customer experience, ensuring that services are accessible, responsive and designed around clear customer needs and organisational outcomes.
- Embed the Corporate Platform Engineering shared responsibility model, ensuring that service ownership, support boundaries, accountabilities and escalation routes are understood and documented.
- Use incidents, problems, service and customer feedback data to identify recurring issues and prioritise improvements.
- Provide service advocacy and support during major incidents and significant service issues, coordinating customer communications, escalation and post-incident learning across the relevant service teams.
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Person specification
Essential Criteria
- IT Service Reporting (Practitioner) - An individual who has experience of using data to inform key decisions, including exploring innovative ways to define and measure key performance indicators to influence the service.
- Ownership & Initiative (Practitioner) - A driven individual, that takes accountability for issues that occur through to resolution and is proactive in searching for potential problems and analysing trends. They will also own service risks and issues and support the implementation of mitigations.
- Continual Service Improvement (Practitioner) - Able to analyse current processes, identify and implement opportunities to optimise processes and supports the team in delivering service improvements. Able to evaluate and establish requirements for the implementation of changes by setting policy and standards.
- User Focus (Practitioner) – demonstrate a real drive and passion for excellent user experience, employee enablement and continuous improvement by leading service excellence and user-focused delivery, applying insight into evolving user needs, selecting effective tools and methods, and ensuring high-quality services are delivered across multiple channels.
- Stakeholder Relationship Management (Practitioner) - A proactive individual with the ability to collaborate, communicate and influence across teams and organisational boundaries, including 3rd party suppliers. They will build and manage stakeholder and supplier relationships, acting as an escalation point, shaping stakeholder engagement strategies, and collaborating across organisational boundaries to achieve successful outcomes.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Managing a Quality Service
- Communicating and Influencing
- Making Effective Decisions
Alongside your salary of £41,985, Office for National Statistics contributes £12,163 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).
The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.
Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.
Inclusion & Accessibility
At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.
As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.


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If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.
Security Clearance
For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying and the department will consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide this will result in your application being rejected.
At the point of SC application, you will need to provide or give access to the following evidence:
- Departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
- UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
- Your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
- Security Services records
Please note: We will reach out to you once the advert has closed to confirm eligibility for this role, this will be via an e-mail. Please check you e-mails.
Visa Sponsorship
ONS are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants are expected to hold a valid right to work in the UK when employment commences. If you are applying on a time-limited visa, this will need to be valid for at least 18 months at point of application.
To work at the ONS, candidates must meet both UK right to work and security clearance requirements (where applicable).
If you are unsure whether you meet the appropriate right to work or security clearance eligibility criteria, please refer to the guidance on Gov.uk or contact the recruitment email provided in the advert before applying. Failure to meet these requirements will result in your application being rejected and employment offers being withdrawn.
Application Process
Number of Stages: 2 stage process
Stage 1: Application
The assessment process at the application stage will be based on your work history, CV, skills, experience, and personal statement. It is important that your application is tailored to highlight the skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to the role.
A personal statement is required at application stage, the maximum word count allowed is 1250 words, which should not be exceeded. You should provide evidence for each essential skill criterion listed in the person specification. As these criteria are scored, it is advisable to give clear examples for each one, including the impact of your actions, ideally utilising the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
Please note that Success Profiles Behaviour examples are not required at this stage of the application process.
In instances where a high number of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted, and candidates will be invited to interview based on merit order
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