Head of AI Service Operations

Head of AI Service Operations & Scale | AI-First SaaS / Platform Environment

We’re hiring a Head of AI Service Operations to build, scale and lead a modern, AI-assisted support and live service operations function for a fast-growing AI platform business.

This is not a traditional IT service management or service desk leadership role.

It is also NOT a pure platform engineering or site reliability engineering type role.

We’re looking for someone who understands how to combine: AI & automation; Operational discipline; Incident management; Knowledge systems & self-service and Service reliability & operational readiness to build a scalable, resilient support operations within a lean, high-growth SaaS environment.

This role suits someone who enjoys building operational maturity and scalable processes in a growing business, rather than operating purely within large, heavily layered enterprise structures.

The environment is lean, collaborative, fast-moving, and highly cross-functional.

The Role

You will own the operational layer of the platform ensuring customers are properly supported, operational readiness exists before release, and live services remain stable and scalable as the business grows.

Key responsibilities include:

• Building an AI-first support operations model using automation, workflow tooling, AI-assisted processes, and knowledge systems to reduce manual support effort and operational friction
• Using AI-assisted tooling for ticket triage, operational summarisation, knowledge retrieval, runbook guidance, and support workflows
• Improving operational scalability without linear headcount growth
• Owning live service operations, operational readiness, service reliability, monitoring, and observability
• Acting as Incident Commander during major operational incidents and coordinating Engineering, Product, Security, and Customer teams during response
• Driving structured post-incident review, operational governance, and continuous improvement
• Establishing operational readiness and go-live governance processes
• Ensuring monitoring, alerting, runbooks, escalation ownership, and support structures are in place before release
• Introducing operational discipline and change control without creating unnecessary bureaucracy
• Working closely with Engineering, Product, Customer Delivery, and Security teams to balance delivery speed with operational stability

What We’re Looking For

• Experience leading support or service operations within SaaS, cloud, platform, AI, cyber, or regulated technology environments
• Strong understanding of AI-assisted support operations, workflow automation, operational tooling, and knowledge-driven support models
• Clear experience reducing operational toil and manual support effort through AI, automation, workflow optimisation, or self-service enablement
• Strong incident management capability with experience leading high-severity operational incidents
• Experience implementing SLAs, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, escalation paths, operational governance, and service readiness processes
• Credibility around operational readiness, release governance, and risk management
• Ability to work effectively across Engineering, Product, Operations, Security, and customer-facing teams
• Comfortable operating in a lean scaling environment where structure and processes are still evolving

Preferred experience:

• Scaling AI-assisted or automation-led support functions
• Supporting AI-enabled products or data-driven platforms
• Working within regulated or high-availability environments

What This Role Is NOT

• Not a traditional ITIL-only service delivery role
• Not a large-team customer support management role
• Not a pure platform engineering or SRE leadership position

This is a hands-on operational leadership role focused on building AI-assisted support operations, operational discipline, and scalable live-service processes within a fast-growing SaaS platform environment. We are not looking for a machine learning engineer. We are looking for an operational leader who understands how to apply AI, automation, workflow tooling, and knowledge systems to improve support operations at scale.