DevOps Team Manager (Azure)

Location: Bromley, England, United Kingdom; on-site and remote work options are stated

Company

Cloud-native school management information system provider serving thousands of schools across three UK countries.

What you will do

• Lead, manage and develop a team of 3–4 DevOps engineers, including recruitment, objectives, appraisals, performance management and coaching.
• Provide hands-on leadership for an Azure-hosted, multi-tenant SaaS platform, including platform services, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code, automation and operational tooling.
• Own SLAs/SLOs, service health, major-incident command, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery, business continuity testing and continuous service improvement.
• Implement and maintain change, release, security, access, audit and operational controls across Azure DevOps, SysAid and related systems.
• Set guardrails for AI-assisted DevOps delivery using tools such as Claude, GitHub Copilot and Codex, with human accountability and security controls.
• Report service health, delivery progress, risks, exceptions and control effectiveness to the CTO and Executive Team.

Requirements

• Proven line-management experience leading a DevOps, CloudOps or platform team.
• Current hands-on experience with Azure platform engineering, Azure DevOps pipelines, Bicep/ARM, automation, troubleshooting, security and resilience; approximately 70% of the role is hands-on engineering.
• Deep Azure expertise across Entra ID, App Services, Key Vault, App Gateway, VNets, Azure SQL or MySQL, WAF and DNS.
• Experience operating production, multi-tenant SaaS at scale, including SLA/SLO ownership, major incidents, disaster recovery and service improvement.
• Experience implementing operational controls, change governance, audit evidence, risk classification, approvals, rollback and post-change verification in a regulated or data-sensitive environment.
• Willingness to participate in an out-of-hours on-call rota, including scheduled evenings, weekends and bank holidays where required.

Nice to have

• Experience with ISO 27001 or similar operational-control improvement programmes.
• AKS or Kubernetes and Docker experience for multi-tenant workloads.
• ITIL, service-management platforms such as SysAid, or experience in education, public sector, health or finance.
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert certification.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on engineering leadership combined with people and team management.
• Shared participation in the scheduled on-call rota with planned handovers and recovery time.
• Focus on coaching, accountability, reliability, technical debt reduction, training and documentation.
• Cross-functional collaboration with Software Engineering, CloudOps, IT, Security, QA, Compliance and external partners.