Overview
The Premier League’s Digital Media team is seeking an accomplished and experienced Service Reliability Manager to oversee the reliability of a video platform and the vendors and partners that work across this programme of work.
The Premier League’s digital channels play a crucial role in expanding the global reach of our competition, increasing engagement among football fans, and supporting our member Clubs, broadcast licensees and commercial partners.
This role will contribute directly to the League’s digital growth strategy by overseeing the day-to-day cross-vendor support and reliability of the Premier League’s Digital Video Product.
The ideal candidate will bring a background in digital, broadcast or telco reliability management, a strong sense of ownership, exceptional attention to detail and organisational skills, and a collaborative, proactive mindset.
Who we are
The Premier League is home to some of the most competitive and compelling football in the world. The League and its Clubs use the power and popularity of the competition to inspire fans, communities and partners in the UK and across the world. The Premier League brings people together from all backgrounds. It is a competition for everyone, everywhere and is available to watch in over 900 million homes in 189 countries.
We have a wide variety of responsibilities. These include organising the competition and its Handbook as well as managing the centralised broadcast and commercial rights. The work we do in conjunction with the Clubs also goes far beyond the 90 minutes. We support and provide a framework for youth development, we protect the organisation’s intellectual property, support the wider game and community programmes, undertake international development work and liaise with governing bodies and other leagues.
The Premier League is an equal opportunities employer and strives to create an inclusive culture where talent can flourish. We believe in the potential of everyone and open our doors to those who share those values. All appointments will be made based on merit; however, we particularly encourage applications from women, people from minority ethnic communities, LGBTQ+ people and disabled people.
Our hybrid-working model also allows you some variety on your place of work, offering you the chance to work from home on some days each week. Where possible, you will attend the office or site visits in line with our company policy. All staff liaise closely with their line manager to manage their time appropriately and according to their work and team requirements.
The role
· Own the end-to-end operational responsibility of all technology platforms, including Asset Ingest and Management, Content Encoding/Transcoding and Content Delivery. Ensuring a robust, stable and highly available platform.
· Manage cross-vendor dependencies and release schedules to ensure platform stability.
· Your primary goal is to maximise uptime and minimise disruption of the OTT platform.
· Lead daily operations of the Premier League’s Digital Operations Centre (DNOC).
· Working with the Head of Digital Architecture and Development to ensure we are maximising value and stability from our 3rd party partners, owning accountability for identifying and delivering cost-saving opportunities through process optimisation and automation.
· Act as the primary technical command lead during high-severity incidents.
· Facilitate vendor alignment with the product roadmap and priorities, ensuring clarity and consistency in communications with reliability being at the core of this.
· Build collaborative relationships with commercial partners to support delivery objectives and surface potential risks or blockers.
· Own and maintain the programme risk and issue log, escalating concerns as needed.
· Prepare for and run regular stakeholder planning and status meetings and contribute to senior leadership updates.
· Constantly challenge ways of working and introduce best practices.
Requirements for the role
· Previously held a similar service reliability role within a multi-vendor or cross-functional environment.
· Extensive experience leading a technology operations and service management function within the media, broadcast, telco or streaming industry.
· Maintain deep, hands-on understanding of live streaming delivery architecture and associated operational tooling.
· Working knowledge of digital platforms and agile delivery models, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
· Build and mentor a high-performing cross-vendor team of operations and service management professionals. Foster a proactive, data-driven, and continuous improvement culture that moves beyond reactive support to predictive and preventative operations.
· Deep understanding of the components of a modern content supply chain, from ingest and asset management to playout and OTT/VOD distribution.
· Drive continuous improvement of monitoring, telemetry, automation, alerting configuration, and operational runbooks.
· Hands-on understanding of encoder/transcoder workflows, DRM, CDNs, networking, logging, and cloud environments.
· Familiarity with monitoring and observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, Kibana, CloudWatch, IneoQuest and Conviva.
· Proven track record of managing critical incidents and implementing robust problem management frameworks to prevent recurrence.
· Exceptional attention to detail and organisational skills.
· Calm under pressure with a logical approach to problem solving.
· Positive, proactive attitude and strong communication skills.
· Team player who takes pride in shared achievements.
