Service Delivery Lead (6 Month FTC)

Service Delivery Lead (6 Month FTC)

 

 Prolific

Prolific is not just another player in the AI space – we are the architects of the human data infrastructure that's reshaping the landscape of AI development. In a world where foundational AI technologies are increasingly commoditised, it's the quality and diversity of human-generated data that truly differentiates products and models.

The role

At Prolific, our product development group is a powerhouse of Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Research – all working in lockstep. You'll thrive in cross-functional teams, each with a clear mission and the freedom to self-organise and innovate towards the best possible outcomes. We're passionate about moving fast and continuously improving, and we champion strong engineering principles and a culture of strong ownership.

We are looking for an experienced Service Delivery Lead to join for a 6 month FTC to represent and champion service management within the Service Reliability team. This is a pivotal role where you will be accountable for developing, embedding, and evolving best practices in service management across Prolific. You will act as the counterpart to the Service Reliability Lead, ensuring our operational processes, service delivery standards, and customer experience consistently meet the highest expectations.

This is a highly hands-on role, with approximately 90% of your time spent directly impacting the business and customer experience through both proactive initiatives and reactive operational work. You will be deeply involved with improving incident response, driving service reliability, and delivering meaningful improvements for users. 

What you’ll be doing in the role 

• Building relationships with different teams across Prolific from Engineering and Product to our Operations and support teams. This will help you gain insights into the business operations.
• Support the onboarding of new third party vendors within Engineering, ensuring appropriate governance and controls are in place.
• Maintain and manage existing third party relationships, including performance monitoring, contract oversight, and cost analysis to ensure value and alignment with business objectives.
• Oversee all newly onboarded vendors from a risk and business impact perspective. For any vendors identified as critical to the business, take ownership of developing and maintaining appropriate disaster recovery and continuity plans with business owners.
• Responsible for the configuration and ongoing maintenance of our incident management tool. This includes hands-on configuration, implementing new features, and continuously driving innovation to improve outcomes for both the business and customers.
• Assist with providing guidance on service management capabilities throughout Prolific.
• Act as an incident lead within the business, responsible for facilitating incident bridges, driving effective mitigation to reduce customer impact and ensuring clear communication to our customers and stakeholders.  
• Collaborate with Engineering Managers to ensure post-incident analysis and reviews are undertaken, root causes identified and lessons learned.
• Help enable teams to understand their failure modes, while understanding impact back to the business and customers based on our incident management priority matrix. 
• Oversee the end to end maintenance process, ensuring upgrades and rollouts are executed smoothly with minimal customer disruption. This includes assessing risks, implementing migration plans, and communicating effectively with customers.
• Coach our Engineering Managers in how to organise and run chaos days with our teams so that they can learn how their services are affected during downtime and identify opportunities to build resilience while improving our observability.
• Take ownership and drive improvement of key service management processes.  
• Provide assistance to engineering teams outside standard working hours through involvement in an on-call rotation, taking on the role of an incident lead.
• Responsible for managing the on-call function, including financial calculations, configuring out of hours tooling, and ensuring engineers have the necessary guidance, runbooks, and alerts to support effective incident response.
• Contribute towards designing and implementing service management reporting through metrics such as availability, SLA’s and SLO’s.
• Act as the lead for service transitions, overseeing critical changes to the customer journey your responsibility will be delivering pre-mortems to identify risks and coordinating rollout plans with key stakeholders.
• Proactively monitor and identify underperforming or unreliable API endpoints, assessing their impact on customers. Develop strategic health check reviews with recommendations for platform usage, and highlight underperforming endpoints to product managers to prioritise investigation and resolution by the relevant teams.
• Collect and analyse key metrics on incident management performance and engineering development on a weekly basis for the ExCo team.
• Act as the Service Reliability representative in the quarterly security forum, summarising incident management trends, behaviours, and insights to our leadership team. 
• Responsible for managing key policies to ensure ongoing compliance with Cyber Essentials, SOC2 and ISO27001 standards. This includes regularly gathering evidence and maintaining audit readiness to meet regulatory requirements.
• Responsible for facilitating weekly refinement sessions with Service Reliability to ensure initiative deadlines are met. Act as a proactive problem-solver, providing clear guidance and removing blockers to keep the team on track and focused.
• Responsible for facilitating, planning, and prioritising quarterly initiatives in partnership with the Service Reliability Lead, serving as their counterpart to align on goals and execution.

What you’ll bring to the role

• Problem-solving and critical thinking capabilities to identify and address challenges within Service Reliability. 
• Experience leading incidents from initial detection through to managing communication and improvement actions with individual teams.
• Experience of working within a DevOps environment.
• Experience of the design and implementation of continuous improvement activity.
• Keen interest in operational metrics, to help drive improvements within Service Reliability. 
• You will be able to collaborate with others and build strong relationships with key stakeholders. 
• Excellent written and verbal communication abilities, capable of articulating complex concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Even better if you have 

• Experience using Datadog for monitoring and observability.
• Experience using incident management tooling desired preference being Rootly.

 

Why Prolific is a great place to work

We've built a unique platform that connects researchers and companies with a global pool of participants, enabling the collection of high-quality, ethically sourced human behavioral data and feedback. This data is the cornerstone of developing more accurate, nuanced, and aligned AI systems.

We believe that the next leap in AI capabilities won't come solely from scaling existing models, but from integrating diverse human perspectives and behaviors into AI development. By providing this crucial human data infrastructure, Prolific is positioning itself at the forefront of the next wave of AI innovation – one that reflects the breath and the best of humanity.

Working for us will place you at the forefront of AI innovation, providing access to our unique human data platform and opportunities for groundbreaking research. Join us to enjoy a competitive salary, benefits, and remote working within our impactful, mission-driven culture.

 

Links to more information on Prolific

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