At Kinetic we're redefining operational excellence in higher education, conferencing, and events. As the leading provider of software solutions for student accommodation, event management, catering, and residential services, we help institutions streamline operations, elevate customer experiences, and unlock their full potential.
With over 25 years of experience and trusted by more than 350 institutions worldwide, our software empowers universities and venues to run smarter, faster, and more collaboratively. From bustling campuses to dynamic corporate environments, our technology adapts to the rhythm of each organisation - helping them thrive in a fast-changing world.
We're backed by Constellation Software Inc., one of the largest software groups in the world, offering access to incredible growth opportunities, shared knowledge, and career pathways. We are a remote-first, people-led team that values ownership, curiosity, and collaboration.
Kinetic's operational engine is growing faster than its infrastructure for managing it. This role exists to fix that... and more importantly to make sure it stays fixed!
The Senior Service Operations Lead is a newly created role at the heart of that ambition. Reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer, this person will be the connective tissue between our operational teams and our customers, acting as a credible, senior escalation point when service issues arise, and as the internal coordinator who ensures those issues are understood, tracked, and resolved at their root.
This is a role for someone who thrives in complexity: comfortable engaging directly with customers at a senior level, and equally comfortable working across technical, product, and operational teams to drive resolution and build better processes. They will own a formal view of operational issues and their resolution, giving the business the visibility it needs to improve continuously and prioritise effectively.
With Customer Experience having taken on a more commercial focus, this role provides a critical point of continuity, ensuring that customers always have a senior, accountable contact for service matters, and that nothing falls between the cracks of a growing and evolving organisation.
What You'll Be Responsible For:
Customer Escalation Management
- Serve as the senior escalation point for customers experiencing significant or recurring service issues, owning the customer relationship through to resolution.
- Communicate proactively and credibly with affected customers, setting expectations, providing updates, and closing the loop when issues are resolved.
- Act as the bridge between the customer's experience and the internal teams responsible for resolution, ensuring both sides are informed and aligned.
- Work closely with the Customer Experience team to ensure clean, confident handoffs when service escalations arise, giving them the assurance that issues are in safe hands.
Operational Debt Tracking & Root Cause Resolution
- Own and maintain a formal operational debt and issue register, capturing known problems, their status, accountable owners, and resolution progress.
- Drive the identification and documentation of root causes, particularly those surfaced through incidents, outages, and customer escalations.
- Chase and coordinate resolution activity across teams, including product and engineering teams where issues have a product or platform dimension, ensuring progress without holding authority, influencing through relationship and rigour rather than hierarchy.
- Surface patterns and systemic issues to the COO with clarity and context, enabling strategic prioritisation without requiring the COO to be in the detail.
Cross-Functional Coordination & Enablement
- Build trusted relationships with the heads of Support, Cloud Operations, Professional Services, and Information Security, as well as Product Owners and their engineering teams, acting as a supportive peer, not an auditor.
- Identify where coordination gaps between teams are causing delays or quality issues, and work with the relevant heads to close them.
- Develop and maintain clear processes for how escalations are handled, tracked, and resolved, bringing structure without bureaucracy.
- Provide regular, concise reporting to the COO on the status of open escalations, the operational debt backlog, and progress against resolution.
In the first 90 days, this person will have established themselves as a trusted presence across the operational leadership team, built a clear picture of the current service and issue landscape, and taken ownership of at least a handful of live customer escalations, handling them with the care and coordination the role requires.
Within six months, a functioning issue register is in place and being actively used. Escalations are being handled consistently and professionally. The CX team is confident handing off service issues. Root causes are being documented and tracked, with visible progress on resolution.
Within a year, patterns in the issue backlog are informing strategic prioritisation. Customer satisfaction through escalation handling is measurably improved. The heads of the operational functions see this person as genuinely valuable to them, not as overhead.
What You'll Bring
Essential Experience
- Demonstrable experience managing complex, senior customer escalations in a B2B SaaS environment, with an understanding of how operational, product, and engineering teams prioritise and manage issues.
- Sufficient technical fluency to understand cloud operations, infrastructure incidents, support issues, and SaaS product behaviour; enough to ask the right questions and earn credibility with technical and product teams.
- Strong process orientation: able to design, implement and maintain tracking frameworks without instruction.
- Excellent cross-functional coordination skills, comfortable influencing without authority across multiple teams and functions.
- High emotional intelligence and composure under pressure, particularly in customer-facing situations involving service failures.
- Clear, confident communicator, able to adapt tone and content for frustrated customers, technical engineers, and senior leadership alike.
- Comfortable working in an AI-enabled environment and curious about how AI tools can improve operational workflows, issue tracking, and cross-functional coordination.
Nice to Have
- Exposure to root cause analysis methodologies (e.g. 5 Whys, Ishikawa).
- Experience of structured process improvement methodologies (e.g. Lean, Six Sigma)
- Familiarity with ITIL or similar service management frameworks.
- Experience of working with or within the higher education sector.
Key Attributes
Accountability
Takes clear ownership of escalations and the issue register; doesn't let things drift or pass the buck.
Process Builder
Designs and embeds repeatable processes to ensure great customer outcomes at every stage of their journey.
Influence without authority
Drives resolution across teams they don't manage, through influence, relationship, persistence, and credibility.
Customer empathy
Understands the impact of service failures on customers and brings genuine care to how they handle them.
Analytical rigour
Tracks, synthesises and communicates complex operational information with clarity and accuracy.
Collaborative by nature
Seen as a support to the operational heads, not a threat; builds trust quickly and maintains it.
Calm under pressure
Performs well in high-stakes situations without becoming reactive or losing sight of the bigger picture.
This role reports directly to the Chief Operating Officer and is intended to act as an extension of the COO's operational oversight, not a replacement for it. The individual will work most closely with:
- COO: primary reporting line; regular briefings on escalation status and the issue resolution backlog.
- Head of Support: closest operational partner; many escalations will originate here.
- Head of Cloud Operations: key partner for understanding and resolving technical root causes.
- Head of Professional Services: coordination on delivery-related customer issues.
- Head of Information Security: involvement where incidents have a security dimension.
- Product Owners & Engineering teams: critical partners for issues with a product or platform root cause; working together to understand, prioritise, and drive resolution.
- CX / Commercial team: escalation handoff point; ensuring confidence in the transition of service issues.
If you're the kind of person who gets frustrated when the same problem keeps happening and nobody owns fixing it, if you find yourself naturally mapping out how things should connect, chasing threads until they're resolved, and building trust with people who initially wondered why you were in the room, this role was written for you. The problems are real, the impact is immediate, and the business genuinely needs this done well.
Why Kinetic
This is an opportunity to shape the operations function for a growing product suite used by universities and venues worldwide. You'll have a visible leadership role with scope to influence technical direction and service quality. Backed by Constellation Software Inc., Kinetic offers access to substantial resources, career progression and a collaborative team culture.
At Kinetic, we believe work should come with rewards that make a real difference. Here's just a taste of what you can expect when you join us:
- 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) - with extra days the longer you're with us
- Two paid wellbeing days each year, with a budget to enjoy some time out with someone important to you
- Enhanced pension contributions to support your future
- Two paid days a year to give back through volunteering, charity work, or sustainability projects with our Green Team
- Salary sacrifice schemes for electric vehicles and cycle-to-work
- 24/7 access to our Employee Assistance Programme for confidential advice and support
- A full annual health check to keep you at your best
- A flexible benefits platform - from life assurance and learning opportunities to retail discounts and cinema tickets
- A genuine people-first culture where your growth and wellbeing come first
- Performance-related bonus scheme to reward your contribution
- Regular socials - from team get-togethers to all-company celebrations, with each department owning a budget for their events
- The opportunity to attend group conferences, away days and learning forums both in the UK and abroad - network with other talent
We've created a welcoming office environment, with well-stocked kitchens offering free breakfast, fresh fruit, hot and cold drinks, and a range of tuck shop goodies to keep you fuelled throughout the day.
Kinetic is an equal opportunity employer, fostering diversity and committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
