TechOps Lead

TechOps Lead

Croydon (3 days a week) + WFH, with occasional UK site travel

About Hozah

Hozah makes parking automatic. Our cameras recognise your car when you arrive and payment happens by itself when you leave. No apps, no tickets. We were named PayTech Company of the Year, we sit in Deloitte’s list of the 50 fastest growing tech companies in the UK, and we are expanding our estate of automated car parks across the country.

Every site runs on ANPR cameras, payment kiosks, edge devices and 4G connectivity, and all of it has to work around the clock. The TechOps team keeps that estate healthy. We are hiring the person to lead it.

The role

This is a player-manager role, split roughly 50:50.

Half your week is leading our TechOps engineers: running 1:1s, setting standards, managing KPIs, coaching, and owning the service desk. You decide how technical problems get diagnosed and resolved at Hozah, and you hold the team to that standard.

The other half is hands-on engineering. When a client reports that revenue at a site has dropped 40% while every device shows healthy, you dig into the data, query the database, test the APIs and work out whether it is a bug, a misconfiguration or a camera problem. The systems are built in house, so there is no vendor to escalate to. TechOps own it through to resolution whether the problem lies in hardware, software or config and the fix is yours or a developer's. The software side is similar to L3 application support.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading the service desk and developing a small team of TechOps engineers.
• Personally investigating the hardest faults across cameras, networks, kiosks and our backend platform.
• Using SQL, API testing and log analysis to get to the root cause of operational problems.
• Improving monitoring and alerting so we catch degradation before it becomes an incident.
• Technically assisting on new site launches: network design, hardware spec and commissioning.
• Working closely with our Estate Manager, our developers and the COO to improve the estate week on week.

What we’re looking for

• You manage a technical team today, or have very recently: real direct reports and real performance conversations, while staying hands-on yourself.
• You have run a busy operation with high ticket volumes, multiple sites and live incidents, and kept on top of it.
• You are an adept service desk manager: you know what to prioritise, when and what to escalate, and how to direct the team’s workflow so the queue keeps moving.
• Your instinct is to investigate first: querying data, testing APIs, reading logs. L3 application support backgrounds fit this role well.
• You have solid networking fundamentals (IP addressing, DNS, VPNs). Deep enterprise networking not needed.
• You stay calm during live incidents and organised when several things need attention at once.

What this role isn’t

• Corporate IT support. The users of our systems are cameras and cars, and the work is operating a distributed technology estate.
• A pure management job. Half the week is engineering work, and we want someone who likes it that way.
• Heavily process-bound. We are a scale-up, so you will build the processes we need as we grow.

Pay: £50,000.00-£60,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Company events
• Discounted or free food
• On-site parking
• Transport links

Application question(s):

• This role is based in Croydon 3 days a week (2 days from home), with occasional UK site travel. Are you able to commit to this pattern?
• Do you currently have the right to work in the UK without requiring visa sponsorship?
• This role pays £50,000–£60,000. Is this within your current salary expectations?
• Do you currently manage a team, or have you done so within the last 6 months, with real direct reports whose performance you're formally accountable for (e.g. you write their reviews)?
• This is a player-manager role: roughly half the week is hands-on technical work. When did you last personally diagnose a fault, close a ticket, or fix a system yourself?
• Have you personally used SQL queries, API testing tools (e.g. Postman), or log analysis to investigate a technical fault, as opposed to raising it with a vendor or developer team?
• What is your current notice period?
• How would you rate your working knowledge of IP addressing, DNS and VPNs?
• This advert includes the sentence: 'The systems are built in house, so there is no vendor to escalate to.' Please type that sentence back to us exactly as it appears above.

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Croydon CR0 6BA