IT Systems Manager

Looking for a role where your technical judgement, people-first leadership and process discipline make a visible business impact?

Want to join a global organisation that values collaboration and continuous improvement?

If you enjoy coaching teams, removing operational pain, and embedding disciplined service practices that keep critical systems running, this is the role for you.

Rexel is a worldwide expert in distributing electric and energy-efficient products and services. Our goal is to provide smart electrical solutions that improve the comfort, safety and security of our customers’ homes, businesses, and industries.

The Benefits of a Career with Rexel:

• Contributory pension scheme and life assurance
• Bonuses:  Performance Related Bonus
• Time Off: 33 days annual leave (including bank holidays, increasing with service)
• Flexibility to buy and sell holiday each year
• Enhanced parental leave
• Support & Development: Extensive learning opportunities from day one
• Health & Wellbeing: Private Medical Insurance, free virtual GP service, Healthy Mind Champions
• Perks: Staff discounts, exclusive holiday offers and free financial support and education

As IT Systems Operations Manager you will lead the Systems Operations function to protect the availability, performance and integrity of our ERP and core business applications.

You will combine people-first leadership with strong ITSM discipline to ensure daily business readiness, minimise disruption, and drive continuous improvement through automation and eradication of recurring issues.

Some of the focus areas for this opportunity include:

• Own end-to-end operational stability for ERP and core applications, ensuring daily start-of-trade readiness and adherence to SLAs.
• Lead incident, problem and change management to reduce disruption and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR).
• Design and maintain monitoring, capacity planning, backup/restore and disaster recovery practices; run regular resilience tests.
• Manage build/test/deploy pipelines to make releases predictable and low-risk; keep Jira backlogs clean and releases on track.
• Build, coach and develop the Ops/DevOps team: set standards, run fair on-call rotas, use retrospectives and build playbooks/runbooks.
• Hold vendors and internal partners to account via SLAs, service reviews and outcome-focused governance.
• Translate technical issues, risks and plans into clear business impact and recommended actions for stakeholders.
• Reduce operational toil through automation, eradication of recurring problems and disciplined testing.
• Maintain accurate documentation, configuration records and operational playbooks.

At Rexel, we prioritise hiring individuals based on behaviours and potential, rather than requiring specific formal qualifications for roles, the behaviours that will set you up for success include: 

COLLABORATION: Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to achieve shared objectives 

TAKES ACCOUNTABILITY: Taking action, overcoming obstacles, and meeting commitments 

CUSTOMER FOCUS: building strong customer relationships and delivering customer-centric solutions 

Ideally you will also have had some experience in:

• Hands-on systems operations experience (ERP support or IT operations leadership): you’ve kept business-critical systems running, prioritised incidents and driven reliable day-to-day operations.
• Solid practical knowledge of ERP landscapes, middleware and integrations: you can map dependencies, spot integration risks and work with vendors and dev teams to keep interfaces healthy.
• Strong ITSM practice across incident, problem and change management: you use structured processes to restore service quickly, eliminate recurring issues and reduce change-related risk.
• Confident with monitoring, capacity planning, backup/restore and disaster recovery testing: you set meaningful alerts, plan for growth and prove recovery through regular exercises.
• Comfortable with CI/CD and release management concepts: you help shape build/test/deploy pipelines to make releases predictable and lower risk.
• Experienced in defining and managing SLAs and running vendor/service reviews: you focus on outcomes, hold partners to account and drive continuous service improvement.

At Rexel UK, we’re all about welcoming people from different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives because we know that diversity drives fresh ideas and great results.

By coming together as one team, we’re building a high-performance culture that not only drives success but also creates real value for our customers and communities.

Creating an environment where individuality is celebrated and creativity flourishes, we're making sure everyone feels supported and confident to be their best.