Development Manager

Development Manager

Location: Kaplan India

Reports to: Head of Applications, Engineering & Architecture

Employment type: Full-time

Role summary

Kaplan International Pathways is a leading provider of global education, centered around our students.

Technology is at the heart of what we do, and delivery discipline matters because we operate across

multiple platforms, partners, and time zones.

We are seeking a strategic and technical Development Manager to join our Application Engineering and

Architecture Team. This role is unique: you will own the production line of our software delivery.

While we have multiple distributed development teams shipping code, we need to eliminate friction and

ensure seamless integration.

You will not just be managing people; you will be the architect of our flow. You will coordinate teams

to optimise cadence, professionalise our release capability, and ensure that our delivery ordering

prevents technical debt. You will be the guardian of our platform's integrity and the driver of our

engineering velocity.

As the Development Manager you will work intimately with the QA Manager, Solution Architects,

Partners, and the Portfolio Delivery Team. Your mission is to streamline our development cycle through

lightweight governance, automation, and artificial intelligence.

Detailed responsibilities

Release Management:

• Enforce the Operational Readiness Review (ORR). You have the authority to say, No Go.

• Ensure that before code goes live, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are met, telemetry is active

and run books are updated.

• Coordinate release schedules across concurrent, distributed development teams to prevent

environment contention and deployment collisions.

• Act as the conductor of the Release Train, ensuring it runs on time, in the correct order, and

that inter-team dependencies are resolved before deployment day.

• Partner with the QA Manager to enforce the Release-Confidence (RC) Score as a hard gate in

your pipelines, preventing low-quality code from blocking the flow for other high-performing

teams

Pipeline Governance & Policy-as-Code:

• Own the definition and evolution of our CI/CD pipeline standards.

• Drive the implementation of Policy-as-Code and automated quality gates to catch issues early

(Shift Left), ensuring that no non-compliant build ever reaches production.

• Work with Solution Architects to define and operationalise Green Lane patterns, our

automated, low-friction paths for low-risk changes.

• Move us away from heavy manual governance for standard changes, enabling high-trust teams

to bypass red tape and increasing our overall DORA metrics/velocity.

Operational Excellence & Incident Command:

• Act as the primary Incident Commander for major deployment failures or outages.

• Lead the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process, ensuring we don't just fix the bug, but

systematically prevent the recurrence of the failure scenario.

You'll also carry out other duties, within the broad scope and spirit of your role, as requested by your

manager. Our business continuously evolves, so your role will too.

What you'll bring to the role

Essential Skills & Experience

• Demonstrable experience managing software delivery in a complex, multi-team environment

(e.g., managing interdependencies between distinct Scrum teams or 3rd party vendors).

• Deep understanding of modern branching strategies (GitFlow vs. Trunk-Based Development),

semantic versioning, and the ability to resolve complex merge/deployment conflicts.

• Practical, hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (ArgoCD/Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub

Actions) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/Bicep). You understand how to build the pipes,

not just use them.

• A proven track record of reducing cycle time (lead time for changes) and deployment failure

rates through automation and process re-engineering.

• Strong ability to negotiate with Dev Leads and Project Managers to ensure adherence to our

governance standards.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Experience enforcing code quality and release standards on external/offshore development

partners.

• with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts, specifically implementing SLOs and Error

Budgets to govern release velocity.

• Experience using tools to visualise flow metrics (e.g., DORA metrics) to drive continuous

improvement.

Our Tech Stack

You will be working within a modern, diverse ecosystem that includes the following and much more:

• Version Control: GitHub, Bitbucket.

• CI/CD & DevOps: ArgoCD, Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions.

• Infrastructure: Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Bicep).

• Cloud Providers: AWS and Azure ecosystems.

• Observability: OTEL (OpenTelemetry), RED method monitoring.

• Platforms: Salesforce (and satellite services), Microsoft 365, Standard Web Applications.