Lead ITSM Engineer – Operations & Governance

Wolters Kluwer is seeking an experienced and highly motivated Lead ITSM Engineer – Operations & Governance to join our IT Service Management Office (ITSMO). This is an exciting opportunity for an individual with deep, hands-on experience governing IT Service Management at enterprise scale to take ownership of how our ITSM operating model works in practice, and to make a meaningful impact within a forward-thinking organization.

As a Lead ITSM Engineer, you will play a crucial role in leading the day-to-day operation and governance of the full set of ITSM practices — Change Enablement, Incident Management, Service Request Management, Problem Management, Service Level Management and Availability Management — ensuring that the processes defined by our Outcome Owners are consistently executed, measured, controlled and genuinely embedded within our technology teams.

In this role, you will be responsible for working closely with a broad set of stakeholders, including Outcome Owners, Service Delivery and IT Operations teams, DevSecOps, Cloud Operations, Security, Compliance, vendors and senior leadership. You will act as the primary operational interface between the Outcome Owners who define our capabilities and the teams who execute them every day. Your primary focus will be on running the governance forums, control framework, performance reporting and assurance activities that give leadership confidence that our services are being managed effectively across every practice, not just during disruption.

You will be involved in a wide range of activities, including change governance and CAB or ECAB operation, request fulfilment performance and catalogue governance, incident and problem governance, SLA and SLO reporting, ITSM tooling and workflow operation, and the engineering of automation and AI-enabled workflows that reduce manual effort and process variation. Your command of ITIL, the IT4IT reference architecture and modern service reliability practice will be critical as you coordinate process execution across technology teams and translate operational data into decisions leadership can act on.

As a Lead ITSM Engineer, you will be expected to drive accountability across teams that do not report to you, challenge constructively where standards are not being met, and build consensus on how practices should operate. You will own the ITSM improvement portfolio end to end and lead complex initiatives from concept through implementation and measurement. Your ability to communicate process performance, control effectiveness and service risk in clear business terms will be essential.

Importantly, this role governs how capabilities are operated, measured and assured; it does not own their definition or strategic direction, which remains with the relevant Outcome Owner. Success in this position means making that boundary work in practice and feeding systemic process weaknesses back to Outcome Owners in a structured, evidence-based way.

This position offers a fantastic opportunity for growth and career development within a supportive and innovative environment. You will work with state-of-the-art technologies, be part of a collaborative and high-performing team, and make a significant impact on our organization's success. If you are passionate about service management engineering and eager to take your career to the next level, we encourage you to apply and join our team at Wolters Kluwer.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

ITSM Practice Governance

• Lead the operational governance of all ITSM practices across the ITSM Office, including Change Enablement, Incident Management, Service Request Management, Problem Management, Service Level Management, Availability Management and event notification.
• Run the ITSM governance forums, cadence and decision-making that keep the operating model functioning, and ensure decisions are recorded, communicated and followed through.
• Govern Change Enablement performance: change success and failure rates, emergency and unauthorised change levels, risk assessment quality, approval effectiveness, and CAB and ECAB operation and discipline.
• Govern Service Request Management: catalogue accuracy and coverage, fulfilment performance against target, approval routing, automation coverage and request-to-incident leakage.
• Govern Incident Management as a practice: categorisation and priority accuracy, assignment and routing quality, resolution performance, reopen rates and the quality of incident records.
• Govern Problem Management: proactive problem identification, root-cause analysis quality, known-error management, and ownership, due dates and evidenced closure of corrective actions.
• Coordinate consistent execution of ITSM processes across technology, DevSecOps and Service Delivery teams, and govern adherence to Outcome Owner-defined processes, standards and controls.
• Coordinate SLA and SLO performance reporting and monitor process and service performance against agreed targets across all practices.

Assurance, Risk and Control

• Lead operational assurance activities, including process compliance reviews, control effectiveness testing and evidence collection.
• Support audits and operational control reviews and drive remediation of assurance findings, risks and exceptions to closure.
• Clarify accountability and escalation paths across practices and manage operational escalations.
• Identify systemic process execution issues and capability design weaknesses and provide structured operational feedback to Outcome Owners.

Operational Intelligence and Reporting

• Produce management and executive reporting that connects change, incident, request, problem, configuration, service-level and availability data to business impact and prioritized action.
• Build and govern trusted ITSM dashboards and analysis, ensuring data quality and consistent definitions across practices.
• Analyze cross-practice trends and risk patterns, such as the relationship between change activity and incident volume, and drive corrective improvement.

Automation, AI and Continual Improvement

• Own the ITSM improvement portfolio: prioritize, sequence and drive improvement actions across practices to measurable completion.
• Apply Lean methods, automation, AI agents and human-in-the-loop controls to reduce friction, manual effort, cycle time and process variation across ITSM value streams.
• Design and implement responsible AI and automation workflows across ServiceNow, Microsoft Teams, xMatters, Power BI, DevSecOps and observability platforms, with clear value cases, validation, guardrails, auditability and outcome measures.
• Coordinate ITSM tooling and workflow operation, including platform configuration standards, workflow changes and release of process tooling.
• Establish baselines, targets and benefits-realization plans that demonstrate improvements in reliability, quality, speed and efficiency.
• Lead complex initiatives, owning requirements, plans, risks, dependencies, adoption and measurement.

Major Incident and Escalation

• Act as Incident Commander for high-severity incidents when required: mobilize resolver teams, manage decisions and escalations, and deliver timely stakeholder and executive communications.
• Govern the post-incident review process and ensure findings translate into durable corrective actions with evidenced closure.

General

• Communicate technical concepts, process performance and service risk to non-technical and executive stakeholders.
• Document processes, procedures, governance decisions and operational runbooks.
• Stay up to date with emerging ITSM, SRE and AI technologies and industry trends, and continuously improve systems, processes and methodologies.

OTHER DUTIES

• Performs other duties as assigned by management.
• Participates in a 24x7x365 on-call rotation with the Service Delivery and Operations team and serves as Escalation Manager when assigned.

JOB QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Minimum of 8 years supporting IT operations or IT Service Management in a large, complex enterprise, including 5+ years across cloud, infrastructure, network, application or platform operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading ITSM governance at scale across multiple practices, including running governance forums, CAB or ECAB, performance reviews and operational assurance activities.
• Proven expertise in Change Enablement governance, including change risk assessment, approval models, emergency change control and change-related incident reduction.
• Proven expertise in Incident, Service Request and Problem Management governance, including root-cause analysis and corrective-action governance.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL, ITSM practices and the IT4IT reference architecture, covering Change Enablement, Incident Management, Service Request Management, Problem Management, Availability Management, Service Level Management and Continual Improvement.
• ITIL Foundation and ITIL Managing Professional (MP) certification is a must.
• Proven success redesigning process execution and delivering measurable improvements through automation, AI, analytics or workflow orchestration.
• Hands-on experience with ServiceNow across multiple modules and with Power BI, including workflow configuration and the design of trusted operational dashboards.
• Experience with DevOps or DevSecOps practices and solution development using Python, PowerShell, APIs, low-code tools or comparable technologies.
• Minimum 1 year of experience designing or implementing AI agents, generative AI solutions, specification-driven development or comparable capabilities.
• Strong analytical capability in KPI design, trend analysis, data storytelling and translating insight into prioritized action.
• Experience with incident alerting platforms such as xMatters or PagerDuty is strongly preferred.
• Exposure to Azure and AWS operational environments is preferred.

Thought Leadership and Soft Skills:

• Executive presence and the ability to communicate process performance, control effectiveness, service risk and recommendations in clear business terms to senior leadership.
• Ability to influence and drive accountability across teams without direct authority.
• Demonstrated ability to lead under pressure, challenge constructively, build consensus and manage competing priorities independently.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a genuine commitment to team success and continuous learning.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.