{"id":3517525,"url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-techops-lead-contract","title":"TechOps Lead Contract","company":{"id":52267,"name":"CreateFuture","domain":"createfuture.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/createfuture","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.25,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":40,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"role":"Operations","role_family":"Operations","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":60000,"max_usd":119000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":71},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"ITIL","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"Service Desk","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Confluence","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"PagerDuty","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-30T08:31:17Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-30","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T17:30:02Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"Working at CreateFuture\n\nCreateFuture 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.\nWe’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. \n CreateFuture is aGreat Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row.\nJoin us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.\nAbout the role and team:\n\nWe 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.\nOur 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.\nThis 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.\nA 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.\nKey responsibilities\n 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.\nIncident, Problem & Change: Contribute technical expertise and solutions to incidents and root cause analysis, drive permanent fixes, and ensure TechOps changes follow standard change management.\nTeam 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.\n 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.\nPlatform 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.\nService 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.\nModernisation: Work with development and platform team to take ownership of an inherited Azure estate, stabilise it then modernise it with AI-assisted & reviewed tooling.\nWhat we're looking for\nEssential\n\n10+ years in TechOps, infrastructure, SRE or production operations, including leading or running an operations team\nExperience owning intake, triage and prioritisation for a managed service or production operations team, and working within incident, problem and change processes (ITIL familiarity)\nStrong hands-on Azure and RHEL experience in production\nProven support of Java microservices and middleware in production\nStrong debugging, incident handling and RCA skills, comfortable taking an unfamiliar problem from symptoms to root cause\nWorking knowledge of Terraform, GitHub Actions and Ansible\nExperience in gaming or another regulated, high-availability digital sector\nExperience leading and enabling engineers in a 24/7 operations team\nConsulting mindset and strong communication skills, including with senior stakeholders\nForward-thinking approach to AI and service desk automation\nExperience designing Service Management workflows (e.g. JIRA)\nDesirable\n\nExperience taking over an inherited or poorly documented estate and stabilising it\nWorking knowledge of JVM observability\nTech Stack\n Azure | RHEL | Terraform | GitHub Actions | Ansible | Jira Service Management | Confluence | Java | Spring Boot | Elastic Stack | Prometheus | Grafana | PagerDuty\n\nWhat we’ll offer you:\nWe trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.\nWe offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.\nWe trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.\nOur hiring process\nWe try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process.\nIt usually looks like this:\nCall with our Talent Acquisition Team \nRole specific capability interview \nDepending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.\nInclusion at CreateFuture \nWe believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work.\nIf you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help.\nWe look forward to your application!","description_format":"text","description_chars":6631,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Consulting & Digital Transformation","Custom Software Development","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-30T10:59:18Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-techops-lead-contract","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-techops-lead-contract.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-01T20:01:55Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":30827,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-02T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":52267},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=52267"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-techops-lead-contract"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-techops-lead-contract"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-techops-lead-contract"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/createfuture-techops-lead-contract\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-techops-lead-contract"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3517525}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"createfuture.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3517525},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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