Core Engineering and Operations Manager

Workplace:
London, White City - expectation is 1-2 days in the office.

The Core Engineering and Operations Manager is a driving force behind the evolution of the Enterprise Platform, ensuring the platform and processes advance inline with business requirements.

This senior role has accountability for the run function of the department, including:

• Incident
• Demand
• Service Request

As well as responsibility for:

• Continuous Improvement

The engineers work within an SRE environment but are governed through ITIL. It is for the Core Engineering and Operations Manager to bridge this gap, which will involve reporting and continuously improving processes.

Whilst this is a fully non-technical role, a familiarity with the technology stack will help the role holder to guide the engineering team, by determining priorities, etc. The core technology stack used by the team is as follows:

• AWS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Enterprise
• Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Enterprise
• GCP Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Windows Server workloads
• Windows VDI
• SQL workloads
• Linux workloads
• Commvault
• Jira
• Logic Monitor
• Puppet
• Power Shell

The role-holder is responsible for the day to day management of vendors, attending MSRs, managing contract renewals.

The role-holder will also provide line management of the core engineering squad, who are a small team of very highly skilled site reliability engineers and the management of the non-technical operations team.

In addition, the role holder will manage the backlog of continuous improvement, and ensure that this work is scheduled, alongside incident, demand and service requests

• Provide line management to the Core Engineering Squad and management of the Operations team within Enterprise platforms;
  Ensure a kind, collaborative culture, with no blame. A team where every individual can be themselves and their unique skills are recognised and valued.
• Provide non-technical coaching and guidance to the team and support them in building their careers.
• Manage the in-hours and out-of-hours operational rotas
• Maintain the Core Engineering backlog
• Manage the Core Engineering sprints
• Day-to-day vendor management
• Manage vendor contract renewals (with support from Procurement, Legal and Enterprise Platforms Product Manager)
• Define continuous improvement backlog priorities
• Define and maintain Continuous Improvement epics
• Attend demand prioritisation forums and schedule new demand
• Receive and manage suggestions from the Principal Engineer
• Escalating non-standard demand to evaluative engineering
• Working with the Product Manager, Principal Engineer and Delivery Manager to define the product roadmap
• Managing demand satisfaction surveys
• Managing operational escalations from the business
• Audit and compliance management
• Approving the invocation of DR in an emergency situation
• Lifecycle management
• Working with the licence manager to ensure licenses are managed
• Defining and running Core Engineering meetings
• Bridging the gap between SRE and ITIL
• Continuous process improvement
• Prioritising Core Engineering urgent work
• Requesting Evaluative Engineering time from the Delivery Manager for non-standard requests
• Working with Product Manager to ensure operating costs and forecasts are up-to-date and within budget
• Keeps across and understands all operational, demand, continuous improvement and service request tasks and issues
• Organises engagements with other technology teams as required
• Leads demand discovery engagements
• Manages relationships with application teams across the business
• Organising Core Engineering/Operations events and meetings
• Distributing operations work to ensure balance during busy and quiet periods

• Extensive experience in roles involving line management. Ideally as an Operations or SRE manager is essential
• Experience of managing multiple projects simultaneously, keeping to time and budget is essential
• Demonstrable stakeholder management skills are essential
• Experience of working in cloud-based teams is essential
• Extensive knowledge of both SRE and ITIL is essential
• An understanding of creative leadership is essential
• Experience of Scrum and Kanban-based agile…