Engineering Operations Manager

Job purpose

Arbor Education is a leading EdTech SaaS provider, delivering innovative Management Information Systems (MIS) and back-office solutions for educational institutions across the UK. We’re on a mission to transform how schools operate by enabling smarter, more efficient use of data and technology.

We’re seeking an Engineering Operations Manager to help bring operational excellence, data-driven insights, and consistency across Arbor’s growing engineering organisation.

This role will act as the operational backbone of our engineering function, responsible for tooling governance, access management, engineering metrics, and process coordination. You’ll ensure engineers have the right tools, data, and support to work efficiently, securely, and consistently across our platform and product teams.

You will collaborate closely with Engineering Leadership, Platform, and DevSecOps to align systems, automate workflows, and deliver high-quality reporting and operational support to enable better decision-making.

Core competencies

• The core company competencies can be found here under Level IC3

Responsibilities

• Tooling Administration & Governance

• Manage and maintain key engineering tools (e.g. GitHub, Atlassian suite, Snyk, LaunchDarkly, CI/CD platforms), ensuring consistent configuration and access across teams.

• Administer onboarding/offboarding processes for engineers, ensuring consistent identity and permissions across systems (SSO, SCIM, role-based access).

• Maintain an up-to-date inventory of engineering tools, licences, and integrations.

• Metrics, Reporting & Data Operations

• Develop and maintain dashboards that provide visibility into engineering productivity, velocity, and quality (e.g. DORA metrics, AI adoption, release cadence).

• Partner with the Head of Developer Productivity to track progress against key metrics and report outcomes to leadership.

• Aggregate and analyse data from multiple systems (e.g. GitHub, Jira, CI/CD, Snowflake) to drive decision-making and continuous improvement.

• Own data hygiene and consistency across tooling integrations to ensure reporting accuracy.

• Process & Operational Enablement

• Working with Engineering Leadership, coordinate engineering-wide processes (e.g. team onboarding, tool provisioning, change management, and incident response reviews).

• Maintain and publish operational documentation, playbooks, and checklists for internal tools and workflows.

• Support engineering managers in alignment of ways-of-working (WoW) across teams to ensure consistent, predictable delivery practices.

• Collaborate with Finance and Procurement to track and forecast tool costs and licence utilisation.

• Engineering Leadership Support & Operations Coordination

• Partner with the VP Engineering and other senior leaders to deliver monthly operational reports, including key metrics, resourcing updates, and productivity insights.

• Coordinate weekly engineering updates to ensure visibility of progress, blockers, and key initiatives across teams.

• Support the organisation of engineering offsites, all-hands, and quarterly reviews, ensuring alignment on goals and strategic priorities.

• Act as a key liaison between leadership, People, and Finance functions to maintain accurate organisational data and facilitate communication across the department.

• Contribute to the planning and execution of key engineering initiatives, tracking milestones and dependencies.

Knowledge, skills and experience

• Strong background in engineering or technical operations, ideally within a SaaS or software engineering environment.

• Experience administering developer toolchains (GitHub, Jira, CI/CD, Snyk, or equivalent).

• Demonstrable ability to manage access, identity, and configuration governance across systems.

• Data literacy: experience collecting, analysing, and reporting on engineering metrics using SQL, BI tools (e.g. Looker, Grafana, or Snowflake).

• Proven ability to prepare concise operational reports and dashboards for senior stakeholders.

• Experience defining and maintaining operational processes and documentation.

• Strong organisational skills and attention to detail; able to manage multiple operational initiatives simultaneously.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience working across engineering, IT, and business functions.

Bonus skills

• Experience in fast-scaling or multi-product SaaS environments.

• Familiarity with automation and scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash) for provisioning or data extraction.

• Understanding of AI productivity tooling and how it integrates into engineering metrics.

• Prior experience coordinating department-wide events, communications, or operations reviews.

• Background in EdTech or public sector technology environments.

Accountability

You will be accountable for delivering a 12-month roadmap focused on:

• Establishing consistent tooling administration and governance across engineering.

• Providing accurate, automated productivity and operational reporting to leadership.

• Driving operational alignment through weekly updates, monthly reports, and engineering offsites.

• Acting as the operational glue connecting data, tools, and leadership across the engineering organisation.