Working at CreateFuture
CreateFuture 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
We 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.
We 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.
We 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.
Our hiring processWe 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.
It usually looks like this:
- Call with our Talent Acquisition Team
- Role specific capability interview
Depending 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.
Inclusion at CreateFutureWe 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.
If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help.
We look forward to your application!
Skills Required
- 10+ years of experience in TechOps, infrastructure, SRE, or production operations, including leading or running an operations team
- Experience owning intake, triage, and prioritization for a managed service or production operations team
- Experience with incident, problem, and change management processes; ITIL familiarity
- Strong hands-on Azure experience in production
- Strong hands-on RHEL experience in production
- Proven experience supporting Java microservices and middleware in production
- Strong debugging, incident handling, and root cause analysis skills
- 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 with senior stakeholders
- Forward-thinking approach to AI and service desk automation
- Experience designing service management workflows, such as Jira Service Management
- Experience taking over and stabilizing an inherited or poorly documented estate
- Working knowledge of JVM observability
What We Do
CreateFuture was built to take action. With our 500-strong team of software engineering, strategy and design experts, across Edinburgh, Leeds, London and Manchester, we’re determined to get you exactly what you need. As with our past clients, we get to the root of your challenge and do everything it takes to create positive solutions by building digital products and services that solve problems. With years of experience helping catalyse major organisations into action, our rapid growth has been driven by people who seek to understand before they solve. We care about our craft. We challenge each other by asking, “Why not?”. And we’re proud to collaborate and partner with the likes of PayPal, adidas, FanDuel, Money Saving Expert, Penguin Random House, Yorkshire Building Society and more. With CreateFuture, our people are at the forefront of every outcome and we know that a strong team dynamic is critical to success, so we’ll be there for you every step of the way. We draw on their unique skills for problem-solving – and helping your teams unleash their potential too. Put simply, we want to be an organisation that people want to work for and want to work with. You don’t need to have all the answers. Share your problem and we’ll go from there. Let’s create something incredible, together, today.
