You will lead a cross-functional DevOps team responsible for continuous development of new features and for supporting live operations (L2 and L3) of a mission-critical service classified as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). The service operates under strict SLA/SLO requirements, requiring disciplined operational practices, reliable releases and calm incident execution.
You will create an operating model where incident triage and coordination are shared across team members, supported by clear runbooks, decision rights and escalation paths. You will uplift capability by creating T‑shaped practitioners so everyone can contribute across development, operations and service resilience, while providing people leadership and owning delivery excellence, financial management and reporting.
Key responsibilities
DevOps delivery leadership (build + run)
Lead day-to-day delivery for a combined DevOps team, balancing roadmap outcomes with operational risk, unplanned work and live service obligations.
Run a flow-based delivery system (e.g., Kanban/Scrumban) that supports frequent, safe releases while protecting reliability.
Make trade-offs explicit across time, scope, quality and operational stability; secure timely decisions from stakeholders.
Embed operate-to-build behaviours: operability in the definition of done, production readiness by default and engineered resilience.
Live service operations (CNI, SLAs, incident/problem/change)
Implement and continuously improve incident management: severity model, triage, escalation, communications and restoration within SLA targets.
Ensure change is controlled and auditable to a CNI-appropriate standard: risk-based approvals, peer review, evidence capture and safe rollback plans.
Drive problem management and prevention: blameless post-incident reviews, trend analysis, remediation tracking and reduction of repeat incidents/toil.
Coordinate with service desk, L2 teams, security, infrastructure/platform teams and suppliers with clear interfaces and escalation paths.
Shared triage and coordination model
Design and operate a rota where team members across disciplines manage incident triage and coordination roles, with explicit guardrails.
Establish a lightweight incident command structure for major incidents, enabling non-engineers to coordinate while engineers focus on diagnosis and fixes.
Maintain runbooks, decision trees and handover checklists so incident coordination quality is consistent and repeatable.
Evidence-led performance using DORA and reliability metrics
Use DORA metrics as core evidence of delivery health and improvement: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service.
Combine DORA with operational measures: SLA/SLO attainment, incident volume/severity, MTTR, alert quality/noise and reliability trends.
Convert metrics into action: set improvement goals, run spikes and demonstrate measurable change over time.
People management and performance leadership
Line manage team members (or manage via matrix, depending on structure), setting clear expectations, objectives and development plans.
Lead performance management: regular 1:1s, feedback, coaching, addressing underperformance early and recognising strong performance fairly.
Build a healthy team culture: psychological safety, inclusive ways of working, sustainable pace and shared accountability for both Dev and Ops outcomes.
Own capability uplift: build T‑shaped skills through rotation, pairing, shadowing, learning time and skills coverage planning to reduce single points of failure.
Support recruitment and onboarding: role shaping, interviewing and ramping new joiners safely into live service responsibilities.
Financial management and reporting
Own delivery financial management for the team/engagement: budgets, forecasting, burn tracking and variance analysis; escalate risks early with options.
Manage capacity and utilisation: ensure the team has explicit buffers for incidents/toil and that plans reflect real operational demand.
Support commercial discipline where relevant: scope/change control, accurate time recording and evidence to justify changes driven by operational realities.
Produce clear reporting for all stakeholders: delivery progress, operational health, risks/issues, financial forecasts and improvement initiatives linked to metrics.
Stakeholder management and governance
Communicate clearly under pressure during incidents and high-risk changes; provide credible, timely updates and escalations.
Report progress in a way that links delivery to service outcomes and risk posture.
Ensure alignment with security, auditability and resilience expectations typical of government/health mission-critical services.
Essential experience and skills
* Proven experience running a DevOps build-and-run team delivering new features while supporting a live production service under strict SLAs.
* Demonstrable evidence of using DORA metrics to identify constraints and drive measurable improvement over time.
* Strong operational leadership: incident/problem/change management, operational readiness and safe release practices in high-stakes environments.
* Experience designing and sustaining rotation models that share operational load fairly and prevent permanent dev-only or ops-only roles.
* People management experience (line or matrix), including coaching, performance management and team health practices.
* Experience managing budgets/forecasts and producing clear delivery and financial reporting.
Desirable experience
* Government, NHS/health, emergency services, or other mission-critical delivery experience; familiarity with CNI expectations.
* Familiarity with SRE concepts (SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction) applied pragmatically.
* Experience integrating dev workflows with service management tooling (e.g., ServiceNow or Jira Service Management).
* Working knowledge of modern engineering practices (CI/CD, IaC, blue/green or canary deploys, observability).