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.

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.

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.

• 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 Dev Ops, 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…