Senior Services Operations Lead

About Kinetic

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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,…