Principal ITSM Engineer

Encore Technologies; Cincinnati (OH); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Encore Technologies seeks a Principal ITSM Engineer to own the architecture of ITSM capabilities across client engagements and internal practice. You will translate business outcomes into scalable ITSM solutions, guide design patterns, and drive adoption from discovery through go-live.

You will lead client workshops, advise on ITSM maturity, and oversee complex integrations, data migrations, and platform governance in a senior, cross-functional role.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in IT service management or enterprise platform engineering.
• Proven ownership of end-to-end ITSM solution delivery (discovery to adoption).
• Hands-on experience with enterprise ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Ivanti, Cherwell, Jira Service Management).
• Strong ability to translate business needs into architectural designs and roadmaps.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for executive audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end ITSM solution architecture across catalog, incident, change, and configuration management.
• Lead client workshops to align expectations and scope for delivery.
• Design, build, and implement ITSM solutions with automation and integrations.
• Plan data migrations, validation, and cutover activities.
• Define testing strategies and go-live readiness activities.
• Drive adoption and measure outcomes against success criteria.

Skills

ITSM architecture

Client-facing workshops

APIs & integrations

Scripting (PowerShell/Python/SQL)

Data migration

Education

ITIL 4 Foundation

TOGAF

Tools

ServiceNow

Ivanti

Cherwell

Jira Service Management

Job description

Position Summary

The Principal ITSM Engineer is the senior technical authority for IT Service Management solution design at Encore Technologies, accountable for how ITSM capability is architected, built, and delivered across both the internal service management practice and client engagements. This role owns the translation of business outcomes into working ITSM solutions from discovery and design through development, implementation, and adoption and serves as the definitive subject matter expert on the organization’s enterprise ITSM platform and the broader ITSM toolchain.
The role operates a level above the ITSM Engineer role. Where the ITSM Engineer builds and releases workflows against defined requirements, the Principal ITSM Engineer determines what should be built and why, establishes the design patterns and technical standards the engineering team works within, and carries accountability for whether the delivered solution achieves the intended business result. The role is deliberately dual-facing: internally it drives the maturity and scalability of Encore’s own service management platform; externally it leads client-facing discovery, solution design, implementation delivery, and advisory conversations, and supports pre-sales and scoping efforts with credible technical authority.
The Principal ITSM Engineer is expected to operate with substantial autonomy, exercise judgment on architectural trade-offs, and influence decisions that extend beyond the ITSM platform into adjacent service towers, integration strategy, and service delivery design. This role reports to the Engineering & Transformation Manager.

Responsibilities

Solution Architecture and Design Ownership

• Own end-to-end solution architecture for ITSM capability, defining how service catalog, incident, request, change, problem, knowledge, asset, and configuration management fit together into a coherent, scalable design.
• Lead discovery and requirements-definition engagements with service owners, business stakeholders, and client leadership to establish current-state baselines, target-state outcomes, and measurable success criteria.
• Produce solution design documentation, including architecture diagrams, process flows, data models, integration maps, decision records, and design rationale that others can build and audit against.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs across configuration versus customization, native platform capability versus integration, and automation versus process change, and defend recommendations to technical and executive audiences.
• Establish reusable design patterns, reference architectures, and solution templates that accelerate delivery and enforce consistency across client engagements.
• Define non-functional requirements for ITSM solutions, including performance, scalability, availability, security, data retention, auditability, and licensing efficiency.
• Assess the downstream impact of proposed designs on service delivery teams, SLAs, reporting, compliance posture, and operational cost before committing to a solution direction.

Client-Facing Solutioning and Advisory

• Serve as the senior ITSM technical resource in client-facing settings, including discovery workshops, design reviews, executive briefings, steering committees, and quarterly business reviews.
• Lead client solution workshops to align expectations on workflow behavior, service boundaries, automation scope, integration touchpoints, and phasing prior to development.
• Provide advisory guidance on ITSM maturity, helping clients understand where process change, tooling change, or organizational change is the correct lever for a given problem.
• Support pre-sales and scoping activities by contributing technical solution content, effort estimates, assumptions, dependencies, and risk language to statements of work and proposals.
• Translate technical architecture into business-outcome language for non-technical stakeholders, including cost, risk, and service-quality implications.
• Establish and maintain trusted-advisor relationships with client service management leadership, acting as an escalation point for solution-level concerns.
• Represent Encore’s ITSM practice credibly in competitive and evaluative settings, including platform comparisons, capability assessments, and client due diligence.

Development and Implementation Delivery

• Design, build, and implement complex ITSM solutions within the enterprise ITSM platform, including multi-stage approvals, conditional logic, automation rules, orchestration, and cross-module workflow behavior.
• Lead implementation delivery for new client onboarding, platform migrations, and major capability rollouts, owning technical execution from design through go-live and hypercare.
• Develop and maintain custom solution components, including scripts, API integrations, data transformations, calculated fields, and reporting logic.
• Plan and execute data migration activities, including source analysis, field mapping, transformation logic, validation criteria, cutover sequencing, and reconciliation.
• Own solution-level testing strategy, including functional, regression, integration, performance, and user acceptance testing, and define exit criteria for production release.
• Lead go-live readiness activities, including deployment sequencing, rollback planning, cutover runbooks, post-release verification, and stabilization.
• Drive adoption after implementation, measuring realized outcomes against the original success criteria and correcting solution gaps identified in early operation.

Platform Subject Matter Expertise

• Serve as the organization’s definitive subject matter expert on the enterprise ITSM platform in use, maintaining deep working knowledge of platform capability, constraints, release changes, licensing model, and roadmap.
• Evaluate new platform features and releases, assessing applicability, risk, and upgrade impact, and communicate recommendations to leadership and delivery teams.
• Own the vendor technical relationship, including feature requests, defect escalation, roadmap influence, and validation of vendor guidance against Encore’s environment.
• Advise on ITSM tooling strategy, including build-versus-buy decisions, platform consolidation, adjacent tooling selection, and total cost of ownership analysis.
• Maintain awareness of ITIL practice evolution and industry direction and translate relevant developments into practical recommendations for Encore and its clients.
• Act as the final technical escalation point for complex platform issues that exceed the scope of ITSM Engineers.

Integration and Data Architecture

• Architect integrations between the ITSM platform and external systems, including endpoint management, identity and access management, monitoring, ITOM, CMDB/discovery, security, and collaboration tooling.
• Define integration patterns, authentication models, data mapping, error handling, retry and reconciliation logic, and operational support requirements for each interface.
• Own the configuration management data architecture, including CI classes, relationships, discovery sources, reconciliation rules, and data ownership.
• Establish reporting and analytics architecture so that operational metrics are consistent, reproducible, and defensible across internal and client-facing audiences.
• Ensure solution designs meet security, privacy, and compliance requirements aligned to SOC, HIPAA, PCI, NIST, and CIS Controls, including access control, data handling, and audit evidence.

Technical Governance and Standards

• Define and enforce ITSM development standards, naming conventions, environment strategy, versioning, and release governance across development, test, and production.
• Chair or contribute to technical design review, approving solution designs and configuration approaches before development begins.
• Review the work of ITSM Engineers and Administrators, including workflow designs, integration configurations, and release artifacts, to ensure quality and adherence to standards.
• Own architectural debt management, identifying accumulated customization, workaround, and configuration drift and building remediation into the roadmap.
• Maintain traceability between business requirements, solution design, delivered configuration, and measured outcomes.
• Contribute to change enablement governance, providing technical risk assessment for significant ITSM changes presented to the Change Advisory Board.

Practice Development and Mentorship

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to ITSM Engineers, Administrators, and Analysts, developing solution design capability across the team.
• Build and maintain internal enablement assets, including design standards documentation, reference implementations, training material, and onboarding content.
• Contribute to capability roadmap planning for the ITSM practice, identifying skill gaps, tooling needs, and investment priorities.
• Support hiring and technical assessment for ITSM roles, including interview participation and evaluation of technical depth.
• Champion continual service improvement by identifying automation, self-service, and process simplification opportunities with quantified business cases.
• Support continuous learning and professional development by sharing knowledge, incorporating feedback, and adapting to process and platform changes.

Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Six (6) years of experience in IT service management, IT operations, or enterprise platform engineering, including three (3) years designing and implementing solutions on an enterprise ITSM platform in a production environment.
• Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end ITSM solution delivery, from discovery and design through implementation, go-live, and adoption.
• Deep hands-on expertise with at least one enterprise ITSM platform (such as ServiceNow, Ivanti, Cherwell, Jira Service Management, or comparable), including advanced workflow, automation, and integration capability.
• Proven client-facing experience leading workshops, design reviews, and technical discussions with both technical teams and executive stakeholders.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL practices and demonstrated ability to apply them pragmatically rather than prescriptively.
• Hands-on experience designing and building API-based integrations, including authentication, data mapping, error handling, and operational support considerations.
• Proficiency with at least one scripting or query language (PowerShell, Python, JavaScript, or SQL) sufficient to build and troubleshoot custom solution components.
• Experience with data migration and platform transition work, including mapping, validation, cutover planning, and reconciliation.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft 365, Active Directory / Entra ID, endpoint management tooling, and common enterprise identity and access patterns.
• Excellent written communication skills, with the ability to produce architecture documentation, design decision records, and executive-ready solution summaries.
• Demonstrated ability to operate autonomously across concurrent engagements, exercise sound judgment on trade-offs, and influence without direct authority.
• Experience collaborating across multiple technical disciplines, including endpoint, infrastructure, security, network, and service management teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a managed service provider (MSP) or consulting environment delivering ITSM solutions across multiple concurrent clients.
• Experience supporting pre-sales activity, including solution scoping, effort estimation, and statement of work authoring.
• Experience designing CMDB and configuration management solutions integrated with discovery and asset management tooling.
• Experience with ITOM, event management, or monitoring integration into ITSM workflows.
• Experience designing reporting and analytics solutions in Power BI or comparable business intelligence tooling.
• Background supporting audit and compliance activity aligned to SOC, HIPAA, PCI, NIST, or CIS Controls.
• Experience leading platform migrations between enterprise ITSM products.
• Formal project delivery experience, including workstream leadership on multi-phase implementation programs.

Certifications

ITIL 4 Foundation is required. The following are preferred:

• ITIL 4 Managing Professional or ITIL 4 Strategic Leader
• ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support
• Advanced vendor certification on an enterprise ITSM platform (implementation specialist, application developer, or architect level)
• TOGAF or comparable enterprise architecture certification
• Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate or Azure Solutions Architect Expert

Physical Requirements

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on the computer.
• Occasional lifting, pushing, pulling up to 15 lbs.
• Hybrid position – in office and remote workdays.
• Occasional travel to client sites may be required to support discovery, design, and implementation activities.
• May require work outside of standard business hours to support implementation cutover and go-live activities.
• This is a non-exempt position. All hours worked, including work performed outside of standard business hours, must be accurately recorded.