Sr Manager, Enterprise Tools & Platforms

Company Description:

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

Job Description:

The Senior Manager, Enterprise Tools & Platform Operations leads the function responsible for the strategy, reliability, governance, adoption, and value of assigned enterprise platforms. The role converts approved architecture and technology portfolio decisions into supportable services, controlled change, effective user enablement, and measurable operational outcomes.

Position mandate

Operate assigned enterprise tools as an accountable portfolio of products and services, with clear ownership, dependable operations, disciplined roadmaps, early planning engagement, renewal-ready evidence, and continuous improvement in adoption, cost, risk, and user value.

Key accountabilities

• Functional leadership: Lead and develop the Enterprise Tools & Platform Operations team. Set priorities, accountabilities, service ownership, performance expectations, escalation paths, coverage models, and development plans while building a collaborative, resilient, and high-performing function.
• Technology decision operationalization: Translate approved architecture, investment, lifecycle, and portfolio decisions into configuration, migration, onboarding, enablement, support, adoption, and retirement plans. Return operational evidence to inform future decisions.
• Platform portfolio and roadmaps: Maintain outcome-based roadmaps for Atlassian and other assigned enterprise tools. Address demand, lifecycle, adoption, integration, data, accessibility, security, technical debt, licensing, vendor support, transition, and retirement needs.
• Atlassian service leadership: Oversee Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management as enterprise platforms. Set direction for governance, reusable workflows, service-management capabilities, analytics, marketplace applications, integrations, and adoption while delegating hands-on administration through the operating model.
• Operational reliability: Establish service levels and health measures; govern incidents, problems, changes, releases, and escalations; and maintain current runbooks, continuity plans, support tiers, vendor paths, and backup coverage for priority platforms.

• Demand engagement and enablement: Use a structured assess, design, enable, and deploy lifecycle to turn demand into supportable outcomes. Engage through established intake channels, participate early in planning cycles, and follow through on training, adoption, and effectiveness after deployment.
• Renewal, utilization, and license governance: Schedule usage, ownership, license, support, and value assessments ahead of material renewals. Coordinate findings with finance, procurement, vendor-management, architecture, and accountable owners, then execute approved reclaim, resize, renew, migrate, or retire actions.
• Platform transitions and rationalization: Lead the operational dimension of platform consolidation, replacement, and retirement, including discovery, user segmentation, destination planning, migration readiness, communications, training, support, data disposition, and decommissioning controls.
• Integration and data operations: Own operating relationships and controls for assigned platform integrations and dependencies. Document authoritative sources, field ownership, support paths, change ownership, reconciliation, monitoring, and failure handling.
• Performance reporting: Provide concise reporting on service health, demand, capacity, adoption, risk, roadmap progress, material changes, license posture, renewal readiness, value actions, and decisions required.

Decision rights

• Own the platform portfolio backlog, operating cadence, and allocation of team capacity within approved strategy, funding, service commitments, and platform assignments.
• Approve routine platform configuration, workflow, administration, release, support, and enablement decisions within established architecture, security, accessibility, data, and change standards.
• Define service ownership, operating procedures, support tiers, escalation routes, acceptance criteria, and governance controls for assigned services.
• Recommend tool-fit decisions, investments, integrations, license actions, migrations, rationalization, renewal positions, and vendor-support changes.
• Accept a capability into operational support only when ownership, funding, controls, support expectations, documentation, and transition or exit criteria are defined.

Role boundaries

• Enterprise Architecture and accountable technology leaders retain authority for material architecture direction, investment decisions, and exceptions; this role leads operationalization for assigned services.
• Business and product owners retain process outcomes, roadmaps, funding choices, benefit ownership, and adoption accountability.

• Engineering, security, identity, data, finance, procurement, legal, and vendor-management functions retain their respective technical, policy, financial, sourcing, legal, and commercial authorities.
• The role does not assume ownership of platforms, products, or enterprise-wide asset-management activities that have not been formally assigned to the function.

Key relationships

• Leadership: Director, Enterprise Architecture.
• Team and platform partners: Team members, platform specialists, service owners, and matrixed contributors supporting assigned enterprise tools and services.
• Architecture and delivery partners: Enterprise and solution architecture, product, engineering, cloud, infrastructure, identity, integration, data, security, and technology delivery teams.
• Business and control partners: Business and process owners, finance, procurement, vendor management, legal, privacy, accessibility, risk, audit, and communications stakeholders.

Measures of success

• Service availability, incident severity, restoration time, repeat incidents, change success, integration health, and operational risk.
• Percentage of approved technology and portfolio decisions transitioned to a named operational owner with a support model, controls, documentation, adoption measures, and exit criteria.
• Timely engagement in affected planning cycles and measurable improvement in work-management or service-management readiness and configuration quality.
• Percentage of priority renewals with timely usage, ownership, license, support, and value assessments plus an approved action plan.
• Demand visibility, cycle time, backlog age, on-time delivery, stakeholder satisfaction, adoption, active usage, workflow effectiveness, and training completion.
• Roadmap delivery, documentation quality, audit readiness, backup coverage, and execution of approved license, migration, rationalization, and retirement actions.
• Team capability, role clarity, knowledge transfer, development progress, and reduction of critical single-person or contractor dependency.

 

 

Qualifications:

Required experience and qualifications

• Typically 8 or more years of experience in enterprise platforms, SaaS operations, service management, product operations, or technology delivery, including 4 or more years leading people or complex platform programs.
• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise work-management, collaboration, service-management, or developer-support platforms at scale.

• Experience leading an Atlassian or comparable platform ecosystem, with sufficient technical knowledge to govern administration, workflows, integrations, analytics, and marketplace applications.
• Experience with service ownership, incident and change management, platform roadmaps, license governance, vendor relationships, renewals, migrations, rationalization, and adoption programs.
• Ability to convert architecture and portfolio decisions into durable operations and use service, usage, cost, risk, and value evidence to improve future decisions.
• Ability to balance reliability, user experience, standardization, security, accessibility, cost, and speed across diverse enterprise stakeholders.
• Strong people leadership, executive communication, operational judgment, cross-functional influence, and data-driven prioritization.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in technology, operations, engineering, business, or a related field.

Preferred experience

• Atlassian and ITIL certifications or equivalent practical expertise.
• Experience with identity and access integrations, observability, testing platforms, enterprise architecture repositories, configuration management, and software license-management processes.
• Experience leading platform consolidation, business-process migration, merger, acquisition, divestiture, separation, or large-scale technology stabilization.

Additional Information:

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to candidateaccessibility@versantmedia.com.

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.

Requires 8+ years in enterprise platforms, SaaS operations, service management, or technology delivery; 4+ years leading people or complex programs; bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Key Responsibilities

• leading teams
• governing platforms
• managing roadmaps

Skills & Tools

Atlassian, Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, ITIL

Job Details

• Category: Information Technology
• Seniority: Senior Level
• Commitment: Full Time
• Workplace: Remote — London, England, United Kingdom
• Languages: English

About Versant Media Group

A media and entertainment company operating news, business, sports, and entertainment brands. — Industry: Media and Communications