Job Description

Job Title

Development Manager (Hybrid)

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.

Location

Bangalore, KA, India

Additional Locations

Employee Type

Employee

Job Functional Area

IT Development

Business Unit

00092 Kaplan Health

Diversity & Inclusion Statement

Kaplan is committed to cultivating an inclusive workplace that values diversity, promotes equity, and integrates inclusivity into all aspects of our operations. We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, veteran status, nationality, or sex. We believe that diversity strengthens our organization, fuels innovation, and improves our ability to serve our students, customers, and communities. Learn more about our culture here

Kaplan considers qualified applicants for employment even if applicants have an arrest or conviction in their background check records. Kaplan complies with related background check regulations, including but not limited to, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. There are various positions where certain convictions may disqualify applicants, such as those positions requiring interaction with minors, financial records, or other sensitive and/or confidential information.