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