Managed Service Operations - Head of Practice

About the role

As part of our Managed Services leadership team, you will help public sector organisations run reliable, secure, high-performing digital services that improve the lives of people across the UK. You will lead a world-class professional services practice focused on Managed Service Operations defining best practice, coaching and developing teams, championing Made Tech’s operational excellence, and continuously evolving our operational models, standards, and capability.

As the Head of Managed Service Operations – Head of Practice, reporting to the Head of Managed Services, you will help set the strategic direction for how we operate, optimise, and assure services across our Managed Service portfolio. You will work closely with Service Delivery Managers, engineers, incident and problem leads, client stakeholders, and cross‑functional teams to ensure our services are stable, secure, efficient, and continually improving. You will be accountable for the frameworks, governance, tooling, and operational standards that underpin our ability to deliver exceptional, measurable live service outcomes.

Key responsibilities

You will lead the development and maturity of Made Tech’s operational capabilities incident, problem, and change management; monitoring and observability; automation and AIOps; governance; operational playbooks; runbooks; service health metrics; and 24/7/365 support patterns. You will ensure our teams have the skills, tools, and structures they need to deliver consistently high‑quality live service operations.

You will also work closely with other Heads of Practice and Service Delivery leadership to drive growth of the service line. This includes contributing to solution shaping and bid responses, supporting sales and account teams, engaging with the wider industry, and acting as a trusted advisor to clients. You will build high‑performing engineering and operational teams, developing clear standards, reusable assets, and a culture of excellence, learning, and continuous improvement.

Skills, knowledge and expertise

The below list describes specific skills and experiences that you’ll need in this role.

Don’t worry - we don’t expect you to tick all of these when you join, we will work together to define learning and development objectives that help you meet these expectations.

Skills and experience

• Deep understanding of live service operations including incident, problem, change, event, monitoring, resilience, continuity, capacity, and on‑call models.
• Strong understanding of ITIL practices blended with modern DevOps, SRE, Agile and platform‑engineering approaches.
• Broad technical awareness across cloud platforms, application architectures, data platforms, networks, observability tooling, security‑by‑design, and automation.
• Ability to create and evolve operational standards, playbooks, governance models, templates, and frameworks that drive consistency, stability, and efficiency.
• Skilled at leading and developing multi‑disciplinary operational teams, ensuring they have the right skills, career development, support, and engagement.
• Ability to communicate complex operational concepts clearly and credibly to engineers, stakeholders, and senior decision‑makers.
• Confident operating in high‑pressure environments and driving effective resolution of major incidents and service degradation.
• Strong commercial awareness including cost optimisation, tooling procurement, operational budgeting, and consultancy commercial models.
• Ability to innovate, leveraging automation, AIOps, and industry best practice to drive operational maturity and reduce toil.
• Excellent relationship building skills, with the ability to influence, challenge, and act as a trusted advisor at all levels including C‑suite.
• Maintaining deep expertise in application, cloud, and platform support models, becoming a go‑to subject matter expert for internal and external stakeholders.
• Designing operational standards and procedures including runbooks, disaster recovery plans, monitoring/alerting patterns, readiness assessments, patching/maintenance cycles, and resilience practices.
• Building and mentoring teams of engineers and operational specialists, growing capability and establishing clear performance and quality expectations.
• Driving operational excellence through governance frameworks, measurable KPIs/SLOs, automated monitoring, strong problem management, and continuous improvement.
• Developing and implementing tooling strategies across ITSM, observability, alerting, monitoring, and automation to enhance service reliability.
• Collaborating with sales and bids teams to shape operational components of proposals, support solution design, and articulate differentiated value.
• Acting as a thought leader in Managed Service Operations, contributing to content, events, communities, and client‑facing advisory work.
• Building trusted relationships with clients, providing clear counsel on operational risks, service improvements, and strategic priorities.
• Applying cyber‑security, accessibility, and data‑protection best practice to live service operations within the public sector.
• Educating teams across Made Tech on operational excellence, reliability engineering, service readiness, and live‑service best practices.
• Key experiences
  • Running and growing operational or engineering teams in a Managed Service, SRE, DevOps, or live‑service environment—with responsibility for hiring, coaching, development and performance.
  • Leading high‑pressure operational functions including incident management, problem resolution, major incident handling, and service stabilisation.
  • Implementing service management processes and tooling to improve efficiency, reliability, and visibility of live service operations.
  • Designing and maturing Level 2/3 operational models including runbooks, playbooks, DR plans, maintenance strategies, and on‑call frameworks.
  • Working directly with clients and internal teams to deliver measurable service outcomes and drive operational improvements.
  • Building trusted relationships up to C‑suite level across public sector organisations.
  • Collaborating with product, delivery, design, engineering, security, and testing teams in multi‑disciplinary environments.
  • Analysing the cost, value, and risk profile of operational tooling, processes, and models, and leading procurement or optimisation decisions.
  • Working with transition teams to ensure new or changed services are operationally ready before go‑live.
  • Managing suppliers, third‑parties, and partners to deliver integrated, seamless operational services.
  • Contributing to sales, solution shaping, and winning new Managed Service work.
  • Working with commercial teams on cost centres, profitability, pricing, and operational financial planning.
• Key measures
  • Operational Excellence & Service Stability measured by: SLA/SLO attainment, incident reduction, MTTR, problem recurrence rate, quality of monitoring/alerting, operational readiness scores.
  • Practice Growth & Commercial Performance measured by: revenue growth, headcount growth, operational efficiency savings, utilisation, profitability/margin, cost‑centre performance.
  • Capability Development & Team Performance measured by: retention, skills maturity, staff engagement, performance metrics, adoption of reusable standards, and engineering community health.
  • Client Satisfaction & Strategic Impact measured by: client feedback/NPS, executive stakeholder confidence, contribution to strategic accounts, successful operational improvement initiatives.
  • Thought Leadership & Industry Impact measured by: case studies, publications, speaking engagements, contributions to communities of practice, and internal/external recognition.

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about Made Tech and the job opportunity. Even if you don't feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you’d like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying. We are hiring for this role directly, so will not respond to any CVs sent via external recruitment agencies.

Support in applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com.

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on.

We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We’ve put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Benefits

• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice

Location: Any UK Office Hub (Bristol / London / Manchester / Swansea)

Join us in our mission to use technology to improve society for everyone.

Our hiring process is designed to be thorough, transparent, and supportive, guiding candidates through each step. The exact process may vary slightly depending on the role but these are the typical steps candidates can expect.

We’ll keep you updated throughout the process and provide helpful feedback at each stage. No matter the outcome, we make sure the feedback is useful and supportive, so you feel informed and can learn from the experience.

Our talent team will review all applications, and while we may use AI to help speed up the process, a real human will always make the final decisions. Once reviewed, shortlisted applicants will be invited to a screening.

This is a 25‑30 minute call with someone in our talent team who is hiring for the role.

Once screenings have taken place the hiring manager will review the shortlist and invites to interview will be sent.

You may then be invited to an initial virtual interview which is usually with the hiring manager or a couple of members from the team. This is usually around 45 – 60 minutes and the format may vary depending on the role.

If you progress, you’ll be invited to a final stage interview which is usually with two members of the team. The format varies depending on the role and this is usually an hour.

Final conversation with one of our exec members.

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