Hybrid (2 days per week in Tower Bridge HQ)
Alto Software Group (ASG) is a leading B2B SaaS platform serving the UK property industry. We power thousands of estate agency branches and support a significant proportion of UK housing transactions each year.
The role:
We are looking for an Engineering Operations Manager to serve as the strategic and operational backbone of our engineering function. This isn't a "keep the lights on" role; it’s a high-visibility position designed to bridge the gap between technical execution, financial rigour, and corporate governance. You will be the primary liaison between Engineering, Finance, and Risk, ensuring our growth is sustainable, compliant, and cost-effective.
Key Responsibilities
🛡️ Risk & Governance
- Guardian of the Risk Register: Own and maintain the engineering risk register. You’ll ensure risks are not just documented, but rated, tracked, and proactively reviewed.
- Strategic Reporting: Facilitate risk review sessions with engineering leads and translate technical risks into clear posture reports for the Director of Engineering and senior leadership.
- Compliance & Audit: Monitor engineering’s adherence to audit obligations, including security tooling coverage, Disaster Recovery (DR) testing schedules, and vendor SLAs.
- Board Readiness: Support the preparation of high-stakes engineering materials for board reporting and executive reviews.
🤝 Tooling & Vendor Management
- Portfolio Management: Maintain a comprehensive inventory of our engineering tools, licences, and total spend.
- Vendor Relationships: Own the lifecycle of our relationships with key SaaS and infrastructure providers, from initial procurement to performance evaluation against SLAs.
- Contract Lifecycle: Track renewals and lead renegotiations to ensure we avoid "auto-renewal traps" and always get the best value for our scale.
💰 Finance, Tax & CapEx (FinOps)
- Financial Liaison: Act as the "translator" and primary point of contact between Engineering and Finance for all cost-related queries.
- CapEx vs OpEx Management: Support the classification of engineering spend, ensuring we are accurately tracking capitalised vs. operational expenditure.
- R&D Tax Credit Lead: Own the engineering side of the R&D tax credit process—gathering project data, coordinating with tax advisors, and ensuring our submissions are both accurate and maximised.
- Budget & Forecasting: Maintain engineering cost forecasts and drive budget planning cycles alongside the Director of Engineering, flagging variances before they become issues.
🚀 Operational Excellence
- Internal Runbooks: Develop and maintain the documentation and processes that keep engineering operations running smoothly.
- Efficiency Hunter: Identify friction points in how the engineering function operates and drive the initiatives to fix them.
- Comms & Culture: Support internal communications for engineering programmes and initiatives, ensuring everyone is aligned and informed.
About You
- The "Translator": You can talk "Server Costs" with an engineer and "CapEx/OpEx" with a CFO in the same afternoon.
- Process-Oriented: You find peace in a well-maintained risk register and an up-to-date runbook.
- Commercially Savvy: You treat the company’s tooling budget like your own money—always looking for ways to optimise and consolidate.
- Detailed but Concise: You can take complex engineering data and turn it into a three-bullet-point summary for a Board report.
Requirements (The Essentials)
- Proven experience in a Technical Operations, FinOps, or GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) role within a software or tech-heavy environment.
- Familiarity with R&D Tax Credit processes and software capitalisation rules.
- Experience managing SaaS vendor relationships and navigating procurement processes.
- Exceptional organisational skills and a track record of managing risk in a fast-paced environment.
Benefits
- Everyday Flex - greater flexibility over where and when you work
- 25 days annual leave + extra days for years of service
- Day off for volunteering & Digital detox day
- Festive Closure - business closed for period between Christmas and New Year
- Cycle to work and electric car schemes
- Free Calm App membership
- Enhanced Parental leave
- Fertility Treatment Financial Support
- Group Income Protection and private medical insurance
- Gym on-site in London
- 7.5% pension contribution by the company
- Discretionary annual bonus up to 10% of base salary
- Talent referral bonus up to £5K
We want to make ASG more welcoming, fair and representative every day. We’ll consider everyone who applies for this role in the same way, regardless of your ethnicity, colour, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, neurodiversity status, family or parental status, or how long you’ve spent unemployed.
Top Skills
What We Do
We’ve recently renamed our wider business to ‘Houseful’, which is why the name might be new to you. By doing so, we can now showcase the breadth of our brands and connected capabilities that are driving progress in the property industry. Houseful is the leader in residential property software, data and insight - owning and operating a family of trusted and established brands, including Zoopla, Hometrack, Prime Location, Mojo, Alto and Calcasa. It also means that when you work for one of our brands, you’re part of something much bigger. At Houseful, we are powering better property decisions for everyone - and our door is always open to new applicants, regardless of race, colour, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, or length of time spent unemployed.
