B Squared builds software that helps schools and settings assess, track and evidence the progress of learners with special educational needs. Our tools are used across thousands of settings, and the work we do has a real impact on children and young people. We’re an established, growing company where individuals have genuine influence over the products we build.
The opportunity
We’re looking for an experienced Development & Delivery Manager to take ownership of how our software is built, tested and delivered. Reporting directly to company directors, you’ll be the person running development and releases day to day, leading the team, holding overall responsibility for quality and releases, keeping work moving, and making sure everything we ship is understood right across the business.
It’s a broad, hands-on leadership role with real autonomy. You’ll be as comfortable tightening up a set of requirements or running a post-mortem as you are unblocking a developer, sense-checking Analytics data, or restarting a service in Azure. We’d love to hear from someone who cares deeply about detail but is equally excited by change, new tools and finding better ways to work.
What you’ll do
- Lead development and testing. Manage and lead the team day to day, acting as the central point through which communication flows.
- Line-manage the team. Support and develop our developers and our QA & Support Analyst, who is responsible for testing and second-line support, setting priorities and helping them grow.
- Set the impact on our customers standards. Take overall responsibility for the standard our software is tested to, working closely with our QA & Support Analyst who runs testing day to day, and understand the whole testing process well enough to build confidence in it and head off issues. You’ll also lead testing of our Analytics platform, which needs a closer understanding of the underlying data.
- Own releases. Take overall responsibility for releases, coordinating testing, app availability across iOS, Android and Amazon Fire, customer communications and support articles so everything lines up when a version goes live.
- Sharpen requirements. Make sure issues and new features are properly specified, with clear, unambiguous success criteria that leave little room for interpretation.
- Keep work flowing. Track blocked items and chase down anyone or anything holding up development.
- Stay close to performance. Understand how well we’re delivering and the impact on our customers and raise concerns early when you have them.
- Improve how we work. Continuously look for ways to increase efficiency and effectiveness, including using AI to boost the team’s productivity.
- Join the business up. Work with support so help material is ready at launch, and with marketing so new features can be promoted to customers.
- Learn from mistakes. Hold post-mortems when things go wrong so we don’t repeat them.
- Contribute to design. Do some hands‑on design work, editing and expanding existing designs (not creating from scratch).
- Help run the platform. Support the day-to-day of our Azure environment: scaling resources, restarting services and troubleshooting alongside developers, using logs and diagnostic data to get to the root of problems.
What you’ll bring – essential
- Proven experience leading development and testing, ideally in a software product environment.
- Experience line-managing a team and being the hub for communication across it.
- A strong eye for detail and process. You like clear requirements, clear criteria and few surprises.
- Genuine openness to change: keen to try new things, adopt new tools and keep moving forward.
- Practical experience of using AI / LLM tools to improve team productivity.
- Confidence working with data, including writing SQL queries to check that data is correct.
- Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure, able to scale resources, restart services, and use logs and diagnostics to troubleshoot.
Skills & tools
You don’t need to be an expert in any single programming language, we use a variety, and we care more that you can understand our software well enough to spec, test and troubleshoot it. What matters is that you’re comfortable with the way we work:
- Version control & pipelines: GitHub, including its build pipelines
- Ways of working: an adapted Agile methodology, comfortable tailoring process to fit the team rather than following it by the book.
- Testing: manual and automated testing; we use Playwright scripts built into our own in-house testing platform, so an interest in test tooling and automation is valuable.
- Cloud: our hosted environment runs on Microsoft Azure (scaling, restarting services, monitoring and diagnostics).
- Data: SQL querying to validate and sense-check data.
- AI: hands‑on use of AI / LLM tools to improve how a team works.
Nice to have – desirable
- Familiarity with SEND, education technology or a comparable regulated / mission-led sector.
- Experience building or maintaining in-house or automated testing platforms.
- Experience improving delivery in a small, fast-moving product team.
Don’t meet every point? Please still apply. If you’re excited about the role and have most of what we’re looking for, we’d like to hear from you.
What we offer
A salary of £60,000–£65,000 depending on experience, and a genuinely broad, influential role reporting directly to the directors, and the chance to shape how a growing product company delivers software while doing work that makes a real difference to learners with special educational needs.
- Company Pension
- 28 days annual holiday
- Option of hybrid working, once settled
Our commitment to inclusion
B Squared is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to building an inclusive team. If you need any adjustments to the recruitment process, just let us know and we’ll be happy to help.
Due to the nature of our work with schools, any offer of employment will be subject to satisfactory references and a DBS check.
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