Senior Service Design Lead / Senior Service Architect

Location: Central London, 2-3 days per week onsite

Duration: 12 months+

Rate: flex, but expected to be £700-900 per day Inside IR35

Are you a Senior Service Management professional with extensive experience across Service Design & Transition Leadership? Do you have experience of Cloud programmes, ideally Azure, with a demonstrable background in defining and implementing target support models? If so, apply now for this new contract role in central London.

The Service Design Lead / Senior Service Architect will join an enterprise scale business at a time of real transformation and modernisation. It’s an incredibly exciting time to get involved.

The role is hybrid with 2 days onsite in central London and the contract will initially be for 12 months. It is inside IR35.

Joining a major Cloud Transformation programme, the Service Design Lead / Senior Service Architect will be responsible for defining and executing the Service & Support workstream, whilst leading a small team of Service Design & Transition contractors.

This is a leadership role, so experience in a similar role is necessary, whether that be Service Management, Programme Management or similar.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and scope out all deliverables associated to the ongoing run and support of the services being delivered by the Cloud Transformation
• Define & implement the target support model for the Cloud Platform in a mixed in-sourced/out-sourced model
• Drive the design, development, and implementation of new and enhanced cloud services, ensuring they meet operational, security, and compliance requirements
• Manage small team of contractors, overseeing service transition activities
• Manage the consolidation, rationalisation, and migration of tooling, platforms, and hosting services into supplier environments
• Coordinate multi‑supplier delivery models
• Establish and maintain programme governance, reporting, RAID management, and financial oversight
• Engage senior stakeholders to ensure buy in and resolve cross functional issues
• Ensure service readiness, including operating model updates, process design, support models, SLAs/OLAs, and knowledge transfer
• Drive risk mitigation, dependency management, and proactive issue resolution
• Champion continuous improvement, embedding best practices in service design, transition and cloud adoption

Required Experience

• Proven track record delivering large‑scale cloud or infrastructure transformation programmes in complex, multi‑supplier environments
• Strong background in service design, service transition, and operational readiness within enterprise IT
• Experience consolidating tooling, platforms, or hosting services and transitioning them to managed service providers
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (Azure), modern hosting models, and associated tooling ecosystems
• Demonstrated ability to manage senior stakeholders
• Strong commercial awareness eg contracts and supplier management

The rate is flexible to a degree but is expected to be in the region of £700-900 inside IR35.

For further information, please apply online and we will be in touch.

Senior Service Design Lead / Senior Service Architect – Cloud Transformation