Service Manager - Deadline 20/06/25

Following tasks will be performed by external service provider:

•        Management of the development and implementation of services in order to meet the business needs;

•        Ensuring maximum uptime, accurate and early incident response, appropriate configuration management, proactive maintenance and tuning;

•        The monitoring and reporting on operations and on capacity consumption, and liaison with all (internal and external) stakeholders;

•        Escalate issues, in particular the ones with potential impacts on time or resources;

•        Collaborate with development and operations teams to enhance service delivery and reliability;

•        Management of one or more digitalisation projects, including planning, scoping and control of delivery by external contractors, under the supervision of the responsible official;

•        Manage and follow up a (set of) project(s) in some or all its (their) life cycle phases (inception, elaboration, construction and transition); during the software development phase of the plan, to manage and follow up some or all activities (architecture, specifications, development, tests – including tests with Member States or other partners, etc.);

•        Manage and follow up related activities, in particular those of external contractors, and the interdependencies of the several contractors’ activities, to ensure end-to-end delivery of all activities in a timely manner, typically towards a stringent policy deadline imposed by legislation;

•        To follow up development and conformance testing activities of external partners: Member States and/or Traders;

•        Set up and enforce the respect of organisation, procedures and project office tasks, raising warnings in case of non-respect of these;

•        Manage and coordinate with all stakeholders to address the issues reported by various project teams;

•        Enforce the delivery of the project(s) according to the agreed schedule, with the expected quality and with the resources provided;

•        Contribute to technical design and/or validate technical design as proposed by the external contractor; • Understand the business and technological aspects of the project, including the risks and the success factors. Work with the help of business, process and data analysts, enterprise/solutions architects as needed;

•        Pro-actively identify risks on project delivery and propose and implement mitigation measures;

•        Escalate issues, in particular the ones with potential impacts on time or resources;

•        Produce and/or review documents;

•        Provide suggestions for service or methodology improvements;

•        Support all testing activities and optimization of workflows;

•        Participate in the design of solutions and security implementation in the context of DevSecOps;

•        Structure the information in ways that are appropriate to the target audience;

•        Participate and contribute in meetings with DG TAXUD, contractors, Member States and/or other partners.

Following skills and knowledge are required for the performance of the above listed tasks: 

•       Experience with Agile Software Development methodologies;

•       Extensive experience with DevSecOps process, methodologies and tools: Bamboo, Jenkins, SonarCube including establishing policies, rules, pipelines;

•       Extensive experience with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools like Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket etc.;

•       Experience with Software Development (Java & Oracle) coding tools e.g. IDE, build and deployment tools e.g. Nexus;

•       Recent project and service management experience, preferably in the area of IT;

•       Experience in working with multiple stakeholders;

•       Experience with Project and Service Management tools;

•       Extensive experience of large scale systems integration projects, preferably within IT and customs environment;

•       Technical knowledge of the European Commission standard IT products and technologies;

•       Experience in project coordination procedures, preferably involving a recognised methodology;

•       Ability to present and to animate discussions, rapid self-starting capability and ability to work autonomously;

•       Strong organisational and co-ordination skills;

•       Ability to produce minutes, notes, business cases, vision documents, service level agreements, terms of collaboration, planning schedules, etc.;

•       Very good communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences;

•       Analysis and problem solving skills;

•       Capability to write clear and structured technical documents;

•       Ability to cope with fast changing technologies used in application architecture and design;

•       Excellent interpersonal and communication skills;

•       Good redaction skills;

•       Ability to give technical presentations;

•       Ability to apply high quality standards.

Following specific expertise is mandatory for the performance of tasks:

•       Minimum 20 years’ experience in IT, including recent 5 years’ IT project management experience;

•       Extensive experience of large scale digital distributed systems integration projects is an asset;

•       Prior experience with customs and/or taxation applications is an asset;

•       Strong understanding of DevOps practices and tools;

•       Good technical knowledge of IT architecture;

•       Experience with Project Management tools;

•       Technical knowledge of the European Commission standard IT products and technologies.

Levels: 9 and 10

Deadline 20/06/25

Delivery mode : Near Site (Brussels)