Head of Group Playout Capability

Intro

The Head of Group Playout Capability Management is a senior leadership role with end-to-end accountability for the design pillar of Playout, setting the strategic direction, governance, and outcomes that underpin the long-term effectiveness of the live operation. The role is central to driving sustained transformation across tooling, processes, and operating models - ensuring Playout delivers consistent, resilient, and high assurance performance at the scale and quality required by the business.

As the strategic owner of Playout capability, the role defines how design, standards, and operational readiness translate corporate and Content Technology & Innovation (CT&I) intent into dependable live delivery. They establish a service provider mindset across CT&I, positioning the organisation to scale confidently and remain credible for potential future external services, while protecting live output and customer trust today.

The role leads Capability Owners and sets coherent, modular design standards that translate strategic ambition into practical, repeatable execution. These standards are engineered to hold up in real-time operations for Live Event Controllers and Operational Leads, providing clarity under pressure, reducing ambiguity in decision making, and ensuring fallbacks are explicit, usable, and trusted. In doing so, the role materially strengthens operational resilience and consistency during critical live moments.

As the accountable authority for operational readiness, the Head of Group Playout Capability Management defines the evidence-based bar for go-live and chairs the operational acceptance checkpoint. They ensure that new or materially changed capabilities enter service only when they are demonstrably ready: people are trained and formally signed off; SOPs, recovery paths, and fallbacks are current and rehearsed; monitoring and alerting are meaningful; and ownership for support, escalation, and rollback is unambiguous. This governance protects the operation from avoidable risk while enabling change to land at pace.

In partnership with Content and Broadcast Platforms (CBP), the role sets the strategy for prioritising, trialling, and scaling automation and AI, ensuring adoption is driven by proven value, operational integrity, and risk control. They validate that observability, resilience, and operability are designed in from the outset, and that runbooks and operational references remain aligned with the live service. Innovation is therefore introduced deliberately, credibly, and in a form the operation can sustain.

Working closely with Operations Analysis and Operational Insight, the role specifies the first fact signals and defect evidence that all designs must produce, enabling faster diagnosis, clearer ticketing, and more effective operational decision-making. They embed learning loops with so incidents and near misses systematically inform better standards, stronger designs, and earlier prevention - turning operational experience into structural improvement.

The Head of Group Playout Capability Management plays a key role in driving and maintaining alignment with the Playout and Product Lead teams in Italy. The role actively works to understand the functional requirement and operational roadmap in Italy – facilitating an exchange of best practices between the territories and maintaining a shared view of the technical requirements. The role holder represents the interests of both territories in working with CBP in terms of influencing the technical roadmap and overseeing the delivery quality and timescales.

Aligned with CT&I’s multiskilling strategy, the Head of Group Playout Capability Management harmonises capability definitions, competency frameworks, and training materials across Playout and Live Content Operations (LCO) where it strengthens resilience and delivery confidence. This ensures skills and signoff are achieved on time, coverage can flex intelligently across both areas, and safety, quality, and accountability are never diluted.

Overall, this role is critical to governing risk, enabling transformation, and designing a Playout capability that is robust under pressure today and scalable for the future—anchoring innovation in operational credibility and disciplined execution.

What You’ll Do

• Leads and performance -manages Playout Capability Owners across the Playout supply chain
• Is accountable for in-life performance in these domains, owning adoption, operability and exception trends within the Playout supply chain
• Sets a forward roadmap that delivers safer, simpler, more automated operations
• Defines an AI and automation roadmap with quantified benefits, risks and total cost of ownership
• Designs frameworks, standards and licensing that enable multi-skilling while controlling cognitive load
• Drives decommission and simplification where steps or tooling no longer add value
• Authors and maintains standards and acceptance criteria; ensures evidence into operational acceptance check before go-live
• Designs clear, safe fallbacks so Operations can invoke a red card when steps are unsafe in real-time operations, with rapid revert and post-event review
• Translates operational needs into functional specifications with CBP; validates via trials before scale-up
• Provides modular capability definitions and performance evidence that support managed-service readiness
• Ensures alignment with Italy’s Playout and Product Lead teams; representing the interests of both territories and overseeing the planning and delivery of the functional roadmap with CBP

What You’ll Bring

• Significant senior management experience in an operational, engineering or project environment, including leadership of teams or leaders
• Proven experience of influencing senior stakeholders, including directors, through evidence and clear design rationale
• Demonstrable experience of successfully forming high performing teams, introducing new ways of working and designing operating models
• Demonstrable experience leading teams that design workflows for managed-service or multi-territory operating models
• Proven applied AI literacy evidenced through delivery of an AI-enabled or automation initiative and has successfully gained a professional certification in AI
• Proven delivery of measurable simplification, reduced operator touchpoints and accelerated adoption outcomes
• Demonstrable experience of successfully commissioning large-scale cross-functional work without line-managing delivery teams and closing actions to deadline

Team Overview

Content Technology and Innovation 

Our Content Technology and Innovation team delivers high-quality content to homes, customer devices, businesses and commercial partners across our European markets. With over 2500 colleagues from around the world, we combine our strategic insights, engineering know-how and operational excellence to use the most innovative technologies to create and distribute our award-winning content. 

The rewards

There's one thing people can't stop talking about when it comes to #LifeAtSky: the perks. Here’s a taster:

• Sky Q, for the TV you love all in one place
• The magic of Sky Glass at an exclusive rate
• A generous pension package
• Private healthcare
• Discounted mobile and broadband
• A wide range of Sky VIP rewards and experiences

Inclusion & how you'll work

We are a Disability Confident Employer, and welcome and encourage applications from all candidates. We will look to ensure a fair and consistent experience for all, and will make reasonable adjustments to support you where appropriate. Please flag any adjustments you need to your recruiter as early as you can.

We’ve embraced hybrid working and split our time between unique office spaces and the convenience of working from home. You’ll find out more about what hybrid working looks like for your role later on in the recruitment process.

Your office space

Osterley

Our Osterley Campus is a 10-minute walk from Syon Lane train station. Or you can hop on one of our free shuttle buses that run to and from Osterley, Gunnersbury, Ealing Broadway and South Ealing tube stations. There are also plenty of bike shelters and showers.

On campus, you’ll find 13 subsidised restaurants, cafes, and a Waitrose. You can keep in shape at our subsidised gym, catch the latest shows and movies at our cinema, get your car washed, and even get pampered at our beauty salon.

We'd love to hear from you 

Inventive, forward-thinking minds come together to work in Tech, Product and Data at Sky. It’s a place where you can explore what if, how far, and what next. 

But better doesn’t stop at what we do, it’s how we do it, too. We embrace each other’s differences. We support our community and contribute to a sustainable future for our business and the planet.

If you believe in better, we’ll back you all the way.

Just so you know: if your application is successful, we’ll ask you to complete a criminal record check. And depending on the role you have applied for and the nature of any convictions you may have, we might have to withdraw the offer.