Service Delivery Manager | 12 month fixed term - view to permanent

Leidos; Canberra; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working

Remote work 1–2 days/week

Career development

Defence sector experience

Job summary

Leidos Australia is seeking a Senior Service Delivery Manager for a 12-month fixed term with view to permanent. You will lead a multidisciplinary team of 50+ technical professionals across Defence programs, driving service reliability and governance.

The role offers flexible location across Melbourne, Canberra or Sydney, with 1-2 days per week remote work. You will shape service strategy, ensuring outcomes align with customer priorities and contractual commitments.

Qualifications

• Extensive service delivery leadership experience in complex high-availability environments.
• Advanced ITIL and service-management practice knowledge across incident, problem, change and availability.
• Proven ability to shape service strategy, governance and improvement roadmaps.
• Strong executive communication and governance paper writing skills.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end health, reliability and performance of production and non-production environments.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team of 50+ technical professionals across operations and service desk.
• Shape service strategy, governance framework and continual improvement roadmap using data and insights.
• Provide authoritative guidance to program leaders and senior stakeholders on complex service issues.

Skills

Service delivery leadership

ITIL expertise

Stakeholder management

Cross-functional leadership

Security clearance

Agile/DevSecOps

Observability & monitoring

Vendor management

Job description

Description

Service Delivery Manager | 12 month fixed term - view to Permanent

• Flexible Location: either Melbourne, Canberra or Sydney
• Senior Leadership Opportunity | Lead a multidisciplinary team of 50+ technical professionals
• Flexible Working: Enjoy 1-2 days per week, working from home

About Leidos Australia

At Leidos Australia, our work goes beyond a job title. We design, build, operate and support the systems, services and capabilities that help protect and advance the Australian way of life.

Backed by a global organisation of more than 40,000 people, our Australian team of around 2,000 has partnered with government, defence and national security customers for more than 30 years. We deliver mission-critical solutions where reliability, trust and purpose matter.

Leidos is a destination for people who want their work to have purpose, their contribution to be recognised, and their career to grow without needing to fit a single mould. Meaningful work is supported by benefits, flexibility and career pathways that help you grow while balancing life outside work.

This includes:

• Flex Your Way – Tailor work to your life with options including Life Days (up to 12 extra days off per year), part-time arrangements, job sharing, and compressed hours.
• Wellbeing That Matters – Free access to Headspace and MeQuilibrium, plus dedicated wellness spaces to support your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing.
• Learn Without Limits – Access over 120,000 on-demand courses, alongside technical, project management, leadership, and professional development opportunities.
• Work That Makes an Impact – Contribute to nationally significant projects that matter, solve complex challenges, and accelerate your career through unique growth opportunities.
• Build Your Future – Whether you're deepening technical expertise or preparing for leadership, we'll invest in your development every step of the way.
• And Much More – These are just a few of the ways we invest in our people and help them thrive.

About the Team

You’ll join a team where people work with integrity, inclusion, innovation, agility, collaboration and commitment. In practice, that means sharing ownership, solving complex problems together and staying connected to the customer context, the purpose behind the work and how each role contributes to meaningful outcomes.

Mission Software Systems (MSS) brings together expertise across intelligence, software, and cloud to deliver end-to-end capability supporting the full intelligence lifecycle, from planning through to dissemination and feedback. The team fosters a culture of innovation, leveraging modern engineering practices and shared infrastructure to rapidly build, test, and deploy software solutions across a range of environments, including cloud. MSS also plays a key role in advancing technology modernisation within Government, delivering scalable and adaptable solutions for complex enterprise challenges.

The Opportunity

This is a senior service leadership role with broad operational and technical influence, accountable for the sustainment of mission-critical application services for a Defence customer. You will:

• Own the end-to-end health, reliability and operational performance of complex production and non-production environments, ensuring contractual service levels and customer outcomes are consistently achieved.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team of more than 50 technical professionals across service operations and the support desk, setting clear expectations, strengthening accountability and embedding consistent service-management practices.
• Shape the service strategy, governance framework and continual improvement roadmap, using service data, automation, observability and operational insights to improve resilience, supportability and whole-of-life performance.
• Provide authoritative advice to program leaders and senior customer stakeholders, guiding the resolution of complex service issues and translating technical conditions, operational risks and commercial considerations into clear decisions and practical actions.

About You

You are an experienced service delivery leader who can operate effectively across complex technical environments, customer relationships and executive governance forums. You bring the judgement and credibility to connect strategic priorities with disciplined operational delivery, while developing capability across a large, multidisciplinary team.

Essential:

• Extensive experience leading service delivery or IT service management within complex, high-availability or mission-critical environments.
• Advanced knowledge of IT service management practices across incident, major incident, problem, change, release, configuration, availability, capacity, continuity and service-level management.
• Demonstrated experience shaping service strategy, governance, operating standards and improvement roadmaps that deliver measurable operational outcomes.
• Capability in resolving complex, cross-domain service issues by combining technical evidence, systems thinking, customer impact, operational risk and commercial considerations.
• Broad technical knowledge across enterprise infrastructure, applications, integrations, monitoring and operational support models.
• Experience establishing meaningful service measures and using performance data, trends and operational insights to guide decisions and improvements.
• Executive-level communication and influencing capability, including presenting complex risks, trade-offs and recommendations to senior customer and internal stakeholders.
• Experience leading through influence, coaching experienced practitioners and improving service-management capability across multidisciplinary teams.
• Customer and commercial awareness, sound organisational judgement and the ability to manage competing priorities in a dynamic delivery environment.
• High-quality written communication skills, including preparing concise governance papers, service reports, decision briefs and improvement plans.

Advantageous:

• Experience delivering and sustaining complex services within Defence, Australian Government or similarly regulated and operationally critical environments.
• Experience in multi-vendor service integration and management, including cross-supplier governance and service-accountability models.
• Knowledge of observability, automation and contemporary reliability practices that improve service detection, diagnosis, recovery and insight.
• Experience applying Agile, DevSecOps or product-oriented delivery practices within a sustainment environment.
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional, Strategic Leader or an equivalent advanced service-management certification.
• SIAM certification or relevant qualifications in PRINCE2, Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, cloud or reliability engineering.
• A relevant tertiary qualification in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent substantial practical experience.

This role does require the successful applicant to be an Australian Citizen and hold an active NV-2 security clearance.

This is a 12 month fixed term contract with a view to Permanent

Due to the nature of our work, applicants must be Australian Citizens and be eligible to obtain and maintain the security clearance required for the role. Certain roles may be subject International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements which may limit persons who hold dual nationality with certain proscribed countries from accessing material, or in the case of dual Australian-U.S citizens, may require the candidate to obtain a U.S. Persons Abroad authorisation from the U.S DDTC.