DevOps Team Manager

Bromcom Computers Plc is the UK's fastest-growing cloud-native school Management Information System (MIS) provider, serving thousands of schools across three UK countries. The DevOps Team Manager leads a team of 3-4 engineers and is accountable for the reliable, secure and controlled operation of Bromcom's Azure-first SaaS platform. This is a hands-on DevOps engineering leadership role with an expected balance of 70% hands-on DevOps engineering and 30% people and team management. The manager works closely with the engineers, contributes directly to delivery and operations, and owns completion and ongoing maintenance of the agreed DevOps operational control improvements.

The role requires a credible engineering background. The successful candidate is expected to work directly across Azure platform engineering, CI/CD, Bicep/ARM, automation, incident response and operational controls, while leading the team and setting standards. They must be able to challenge technical decisions, understand operational risk and failure modes, and ensure agreed processes are implemented, followed, evidenced and continually improved. A control is not complete simply because a policy or tool exists; it must work consistently in practice.

Key Responsibilities

People & Team Leadership

• Lead, line-manage and develop a team of 3-4 DevOps engineers, including at least one senior engineer; own recruitment, onboarding, objectives, appraisals and performance management.

• Set clear role boundaries, decision rights and escalation routes; ensure high-risk activities are performed or approved only by people with the required competence and authority.

• Own team capacity, priorities and the out-of-hours on-call rota. The manager is expected to take a fair share of scheduled rota cover alongside the engineers and respond to production incidents and urgent operational issues during that cover, including evenings, weekends and bank holidays where required. Ensure rota coverage, handovers, escalation routes and recovery time are planned and sustainable, while protecting time for reliability, control improvement, technical debt, training and documentation.

• Build an accountable coaching culture in which engineers raise risk early, follow agreed standards, maintain evidence and learn from incidents and control failures.

Engineering & Platform Leadership

• Provide hands-on engineering leadership for Bromcom's Azure-hosted, multi-tenant SaaS platform. Work closely with engineers to design, build, review, troubleshoot and improve platform services, pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code, automation and operational tooling. The manager remains accountable for technical quality while enabling engineers to own their work.

• Set and maintain engineering standards for Azure architecture, Azure DevOps, Bicep/ARM, deployment patterns, observability, resilience, security and operational support.

• Challenge designs and changes using risk, maintainability, failure-mode, rollback and supportability thinking; involve senior engineers and technical leadership where specialist authority is required.

• Own platform SLAs/SLOs, service health, major-incident command, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery, business continuity testing and continuous service improvement.

Operational Controls, Standards & Compliance

• Take day-to-day ownership within the DevOps team for implementing the agreed operational control improvement plan, driving actions to completion and then maintaining the controls as part of normal team operation.

• Implement and enforce an end-to-end change lifecycle covering request, design, risk assessment, peer or senior review, testing, approval, implementation, post-change verification and formal closure.

• Ensure policies, standard operating procedures, runbooks, RACI and ownership arrangements, approval thresholds and evidence requirements remain current, practical and aligned across Azure DevOps, SysAid and other operational systems.

• Ensure production and customer-impacting changes, including emergency changes and customer-specific change notices, have proportionate risk classification, segregation of duties, pre-production evidence, approval, rollback plans and traceable outcomes.

• Maintain audit-ready evidence for changes, deployments, access, incidents, disaster-recovery tests, vulnerabilities, exceptions and corrective actions, aligned with Bromcom's security, quality, service-management, UK GDPR and customer obligations.

• Confirm controls are operating effectively, not simply documented or configured. Track exceptions, overdue actions and repeat failures to closure, with clear corrective actions and independent assurance where required.

• Provide weekly control reporting and escalate material risk, blocked actions or insufficient capacity promptly. Work with QA, Compliance, Security and technical leads to translate procedural controls into automated technical gates where practical.

Delivery, Automation & AI

• Work directly with engineers to design, build, review and continually improve Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines and Bicep/ARM Infrastructure-as-Code, including automated approvals, testing, security checks, evidence capture and post-deployment verification.

• Reduce manual toil and unsafe variation through automation, reusable platform patterns and clear service ownership; ensure manual exceptions are visible, justified, time-bound and reviewed.

• Set the strategy and guardrails for AI-assisted and agentic DevOps delivery across CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code generation, incident triage, log analysis, runbook automation and documentation.

• Use and govern AI engineering tools such as Claude, GitHub Copilot or Codex, with clear quality, security, data-protection and human accountability controls. Apply them practically to increase delivery speed, quality and reliability, while ensuring an engineer remains accountable for every output and change.

Security, Identity & FinOps

• Own platform identity, privileged-access and secrets-management controls, including Entra ID, Key Vault, OAuth, certificate automation, WAF and network security across VNets, App Gateway, S2S VPN and DNS.

• Ensure access follows least-privilege principles, is reviewed regularly and is supported by effective joiner-mover-leaver, break-glass and segregation-of-duties controls.

• Own observability standards across Azure Monitor and Grafana, security and vulnerability follow-up, and cloud cost and FinOps accountability for the Azure estate.

Stakeholder & Cross-Team Influence

• Act as the accountable management and technical escalation point across Software Engineering, CloudOps, IT and Security, QA and Compliance, and external partners, working with senior engineers on design-authority decisions.

• Provide concise, conclusions-first reporting to the CTO and Executive Team on service health, delivery, control effectiveness, risks, exceptions and improvement progress.

• Contribute to Bromcom's software delivery transformation programme and align the DevOps operating model and controls with AIDP and wider software-engineering standards.

Person Specification

Essential

• Proven line-management experience leading a DevOps, CloudOps or platform team, with accountability for recruitment, objectives, appraisals, development and performance management.

• Current hands-on experience in DevOps, cloud or platform engineering, with the ability to contribute directly to architecture, Azure platform work, pipelines, Bicep/ARM Infrastructure-as-Code, automation, troubleshooting, security and resilience. Candidates should expect approximately 70% of the role to involve hands-on engineering delivery.

• Evidence of implementing and maintaining operational controls, processes and procedures in a DevOps or CloudOps environment, including ownership of improvement actions, exceptions, corrective actions and audit evidence.

• Practical command of end-to-end change and release governance, including risk classification, peer or senior review, testing, approvals, segregation of duties, rollback, emergency change, post-change verification and closure.

• Deep Azure platform expertise across Entra ID, App Services, Key Vault, App Gateway, VNets, Azure SQL or MySQL, WAF and DNS.

• Strong CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code knowledge across Azure DevOps pipelines and Bicep/ARM for Windows and Linux workloads, with the ability to govern standards and technical gates.

• A track record of operating production, multi-tenant SaaS at scale, including SLA/SLO ownership, major-incident command, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery and service improvement. Willingness and ability to participate personally in the out-of-hours on-call rota, including scheduled evening, weekend and bank-holiday cover where required.

• Experience working with security, compliance and audit teams in a regulated or data-sensitive environment, with the ability to turn policies into workable controls and demonstrate that they operate effectively.

• Demonstrable practical use of Claude, GitHub Copilot or Codex as engineering delivery tools, with sound governance, secure use and accountable human review.

• Clear senior-level communication and reporting, with the discipline to assign owners, manage risks and dependencies, challenge weak evidence and pursue actions through to verified closure.

Desirable

• Experience leading an operational-control improvement or remediation programme in an ISO 27001 or similarly controlled environment.

• Containerisation and orchestration experience across AKS or Kubernetes and Docker for multi-tenant workloads.

• Knowledge of ITIL or service-management controls and practical use of service desk or work-management platforms such as SysAid.

• Experience in education, public sector, health, finance or another data-sensitive sector, including familiarity with UK GDPR and customer-specific change controls.

• Relevant certification, such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert.