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Toyota Connected

## Company Mission

To deliver inclusive, sustainable, and safety-focused technology solutions that impact society positively.

## About Toyota Connected Europe

The next step in Toyota's continued global growth, Toyota Connected Europe is extending the Toyota Connected family, tailoring its products and services specifically to the European market. This includes Toyota's Mobility Service Platform (MSPF), a cloud-based digital ecosystem that provides the tools necessary for developing mobility-as-a-service products. The market for this is immense and growing rapidly, and is projected to be worth $750 billion globally by 2030.

In line with the rest of the world, European approaches to mobility are continuing to evolve, with the normalisation of electric vehicle charging grids and ridesharing services as an example. Toyota Connected is working to develop and scale the power of its products to meet this ever-growing demand in the European market.

## Company Benefits

- Car scheme - Our partnership with TGB means you can drive a brand-new Toyota or Lexus. Sign up for a 12-month lease, and we'll do the rest. No deposit, no insurance payment—just grab the keys and go!
- 30-days holidays - Helping you find the ideal work-life balance, we offer our employees 30 days holiday, with an option to purchase an additional 5
- Free lunch - Yes, there is such a thing. Working with various partners, we offer all employees a choice of healthy (or not) lunch options for free every day when they come to the office
- Pension contribution - We contribute the equivalent of 10% of your gross basic salary to our group personal pension plan every month. You can also top this up with Salary Sacrifice contributions, and we'll add any saved National Insurance contributions
- Medical insurance - If private medical care is vital to you, we offer a comprehensive scheme with access to online medical support 24/7. We also cover partners and children (we pay the premium, you pay the tax)
- Income protection - If you cannot work due to serious illness or injury, this offers financial and rehabilitation support to help you return when the time is right

## Lead Operations Engineer / Senior Operations Specialist

### Who you are

- Extensive, demonstrable experience as a senior IT/Service Operations leader, ideally having led the stabilisation and transformation of a team through a period of significant change
- Deep, practical ITIL 4 expertise across Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Service Level Management, with the credibility to redesign and enforce standards, not just document them
- Working knowledge of the SFIA framework, able to use it to assess team capability, define role/skill profiles (e.g. Production Engineer, ARE, Service Analyst) and build workforce development plans; comfortable operating at SFIA Level 5–6 responsibility, setting direction, exercising significant autonomy, and influencing across the organisation
- Direct experience transitioning traditional Ops/Application Support functions toward SRE, ARE or Production Engineering operating models, including SLOs, error budgets and blameless postmortems
- Strong people-leadership and performance management skills, able to set clear standards for ownership and accountability while building a positive, high-performing team culture
- Track record of managing major incidents and senior stakeholder communications with confidence under pressure, with sound commercial and risk awareness
- Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure) and modern software delivery practices (CI/CD, containerisation) sufficient to credibly direct an engineering-led operations team
- Experience setting up or scaling offshore/nearshore delivery capability
- Excellent written and verbal communication, able to operate effectively from engineer to senior leadership level

**Desirable**

- Experience designing or operating an "Ops as a Product" / internal chargeback model
- Hands-on exposure to AIOps tooling (e.g. Datadog, PagerDuty) and AI-assisted operations
- Experience in a large, complex, distributed technology environment of similar scale
- Experience working with Big Data platforms
- Automotive or connected mobility industry experience

### What the job involves

- **Contract** – Initial 3 months (extendable)
- Our Operations function is at an important stage of its evolution. The department has an ambitious FY2026 plan to deliver: intelligent automation, AIOps, process excellence, stronger governance, workforce transformation into SRE/ARE-aligned engineering, and a new "Ops as a Product" operating model. To get there, we first need to stabilise and strengthen the current team's standards, ownership and ways of working
- We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Senior Operations Lead to join on an initial 3-month contract to do two things in parallel: stabilise the current team, resetting standards, ownership and customer confidence, and begin its transformation into a modern, engineering-led operations capability
- The initial term is 3 months, with the possibility of extension depending on progress and business need; we are looking for someone capable of, and comfortable with, taking the transformation through to completion over a longer engagement if the contract is extended
- This is a hands-on operational leadership and change assignment; you will need to be equally comfortable strengthening standards and accountability, running major incidents, and setting technical and process direction for the team's future state

**Phase 1 – Stabilise (initial 3-month contract):**

- Reset day-to-day standards for ownership and accountability within the team to rebuild reliability and predictability in delivery
- Re-establish role clarity so Operations is no longer perceived as a default "catch-all" for non-core or ad-hoc tasks; agree clear boundaries with Product, Engineering and Customer teams
- Take direct ownership of major incidents (P1/P2), driving effective coordination, confident stakeholder communication and post-incident reviews to rapidly rebuild customer and leadership confidence
- Break the L1/L2/L2.5/L3 "ticket-bouncing" pattern by clarifying escalation paths, triage ownership and SLA accountability across support tiers
- Introduce interim KPIs and management reporting so performance, risk and improvement actions are visible, evidence-based and tracked to closure rather than reactive and undocumented
- Define and enforce ITIL 4-aligned operational standards and controls, spanning Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change, Release and SLA management, with full traceability and audit readiness, closing the current gaps in compliance and governance rigor
- Support the design and mobilization of a new offshore/nearshore support capability to widen the skills market and manage cost sustainably
- Present monthly status reviews and reporting on service performance, risk and transformation progress confidently to senior leadership and other internal and external stakeholders

**Phase 2 – Transform & Restructure (if contract is extended, months 3–12):**

- Lead the team's transition from a legacy tiered (L1/L2/L3) support model to the target Unified Operations Engineering model, comprising Production Engineers, Application Reliability Engineers (AREs) and Service Analysts, embedding shift-left, "you build it, you run it" ownership with Engineering
- Own delivery of the Hoshin FY2026 objectives assigned to the Ops Lead, in particular Process Excellence (redesigning Incident, Problem and Change workflows around SRE principles, SLOs and error budgets) and Workforce Transformation (skills audits, upskilling plans, and transitioning roles toward SRE/ARE), and contributing to Governance & Risk and Intelligent Automation
- Champion process automation and responsible AIOps adoption to reduce manual toil, supporting the wider Intelligent Automation and AI & AIOps objectives
- Contribute to building the department's "Ops as a Product" roadmap, including service catalogue, tiered service offerings, SLAs and the commercial/chargeback model

### Work Arrangement

- Location: London
- 2-3 days a week in office
- Engagement type: Contract (outside IR35). Initial term of 3 months, focused on stabilisation, with the possibility of extension (up to c. 12 months in total) to lead the transformation phase

### Technologies

- AWS
- Azure
- Datadog

### Level

- Senior and Expert level

Toyota Connected Europe - CEO/Director

Kenichi Murata

Toyota Connected Europe

CEO/Director

Toyota Connected Lead Operations Engineer / Senior Operations Specialist | Welcome to the Jungle (formerly Otta)

Lead AI Engineer

ITIL

The role involves stabilizing and transforming the operations team at Toyota Connected Europe. It requires extensive experience in IT/Service Operations, ITIL 4 expertise, and leadership skills. The contract is initially for 3 months, with potential extension up to 12 months.

Interim Lead Operations Engineer

Operations

Toyota Connected

Jobs

Interim Lead Operations Engineer

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