TechOps Lead

Working at CreateFutureCreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference  while always putting people first.

We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years.

CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row.

Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.

About the role and team:

We are looking for an experienced TechOps Lead to join us on a contract basis and lead a team of 5+ TechOps engineers on a client engagement. You will own the inflow of work to the team and put standard operational and managed service patterns in place around it, working alongside the client's dedicated incident response and change management teams.

Our client operates a regulated, Azure-hosted platform (Java/Spring Boot microservices on RHEL) with 24/7 coverage. The estate has been inherited and is only partly documented. You will bring structure to how work arrives, is triaged and is closed, so that engineers spend their time on root causes and a codified platform instead of firefighting.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You set the operating model, coach the team, and stay technically credible enough to step into an escalation when needed.

A key focus is enabling the team to onboard properly and work efficiently: auditing existing challenges, defining practical short-and long-term roadmaps, driving pragmatic change, and forward thinking on AI and service desk automation.

Key responsibilities

• Work Intake & Triage: Be the single point of accountability for all work entering the team (incidents, requests, changes and alerts). Put standard operational and managed service patterns in place, including intake, categorisation, prioritisation and SLAs in JIRA Service Management, and protect engineering capacity by balancing reactive work against planned improvements.
• Incident, Problem & Change: Contribute technical expertise and solutions to incidents and root cause analysis, drive permanent fixes, and ensure TechOps changes follow standard change management.
• Team Leadership & Enablement: Lead, coach and develop 5+ TechOps engineers. Onboard them properly, empower them to work efficiently, define L2/L3 roles and escalation paths, and keep a sustainable 24/7 on-call rota.
• Roadmap & Pragmatic Automation: Audit existing challenges and define practical short- and long-term roadmaps. Align senior stakeholders on priorities and dependencies, and work with Dev, CI/CD and Platform teams to drive pragmatic automation, balancing it with operational complexity, team dependencies and regulatory (CMP) constraints.
• Platform Reliability: Act as a senior technical escalation point, and make sure the team delivers the fundamentals: backup, restore testing and DR readiness, centralised ELK observability, current runbooks, and the OS, middleware and cloud fixes arising from vulnerabilities owned by DevSecOps and infosec.
• Service Desk Automation & AI: Be forward thinking on AI and service desk automation, such as triage, routing and knowledge, and bring practical improvements to the team.
• Modernisation: Work with development and platform team to take ownership of an inherited Azure estate, stabilise it then modernise it with AI-assisted & reviewed tooling.

What we're looking for

Essential

• 10+ years in TechOps, infrastructure, SRE or production operations, including leading or running an operations team
• Experience owning intake, triage and prioritisation for a managed service or production operations team, and working within incident, problem and change processes (ITIL familiarity)
• Strong hands-on Azure and RHEL experience in production
• Proven support of Java microservices and middleware in production
• Strong debugging, incident handling and RCA skills, comfortable taking an unfamiliar problem from symptoms to root cause
• Working knowledge of Terraform, GitHub Actions and Ansible
• Experience in gaming or another regulated, high-availability digital sector
• Experience leading and enabling engineers in a 24/7 operations team
• Consulting mindset and strong communication skills, including with senior stakeholders
• Forward-thinking approach to AI and service desk automation
• Experience designing Service Management workflows (e.g. JIRA)

Desirable

• Experience taking over an inherited or poorly documented estate and stabilising it
• Working knowledge of JVM observability

Tech Stack
Azure | RHEL | Terraform | GitHub Actions | Ansible | Jira Service Management | Confluence | Java | Spring Boot | Elastic Stack | Prometheus | Grafana | PagerDuty