Head of Digital Operations

Join our journey to create a new experience for the National Lottery and help us to power change for the greater good.

About us:

We are Allwyn UK, part of the Allwyn Entertainment Group – a multi-national lottery operator with a market-leading presence in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus and Italy. We have been officially awarded the Fourth Licence (10 year licence) to operate the National Lottery starting February 2024.

We’ve developed ground-breaking technologies, built player protection frameworks, and have a proven track record of making lotteries better. Our aim is to create one of the UK’s most inclusive organisations – where people can bring the best of themselves, to do their best work, every day, for the benefit of good causes.

Allwyn is an Equal Opportunity Employer which prides itself in being diverse and inclusive. We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or victimisation in the workplace. All employment decisions at Allwyn are based on the business needs, the job requirements, and the individual qualifications. Allwyn encourages applications from individuals regardless of age, disability (visible or hidden), sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.

While the main contribution of the National Lottery to society is through the funds to good causes, at Allwyn we put our purpose and values at the heart of everything we do. Join us as we embark on a once-in-a-lifetime, large-scale transformation journey to build a bigger, better, and safer National Lottery that delivers more money to good causes.

Role Purpose:

• Reporting to the Director, Digital Factory, you will be the main advocate for stability of the digital, services, live products and digital platforms offered by the Digital Factory.
• You will focus on ensuring stability, championing operational excellence and driving continuous improvement.
• Your team will oversee the day-to-day running of our estate and drive operational best practice throughout the Brand.
• Accountability for all digital release management and alignment of all 3rd parties.
• Ensure digital platforms remain optimised and performant and allow scalability and always provide reliable services.
• Mechanisms for sensing and responding, while potentially supporting dynamic learning and optimization.
• Championing the digital agenda and relationship owner within the key organisational functions.
• You’ll be part of the brand Digital Factory leadership team alongside your peers.
• Delivering results - the ability to operationalise strategy, execute plans, and successfully maintain service availability.
• Leading people - the capacity to build and empower high performing teams, and to maximise the performance of employees.
• Managing stakeholders - the ability to build and maintain influential relationships with stakeholders at multiple levels.
• Leading self - understanding how to maximise own strengths and limitations to positively influence the organisation and optimise personal impact.

Role Responsibilities:

• Take responsibility for our digital platform strategy, contributing towards the Technology function’s Strategy.
• Own our services; taking responsibility for support, monitoring, and addressing technical issues and incident management, around the clock.
• You will be accountable for the owning the content management system, support and maintenance, publishing all content on the Web and App incl. bespoke pages and campaigns (incl. FE Development), however, not the creation of content.
• Develop and embed the digital platform measurements and tooling and the use of data, analytics to monitor and enact pre-emptive and reactive strategies.
• Using a fact based and data led approach to supporting the digital insights and digital product team to further enhance product and service features.
• Working alongside the Head of Digital Products and Head of Software Engineering to build in the key measurement features that allow tracking and reporting of performance and customer journey flow.
• Build a team of high calibre Operations and Digital platform resources who help to operate and run the brand technology platforms.
• The need to both lead & influence teams across multiple locations.
• You’ll be able to show decisiveness, good judgement and a calm disposition when our services are under pressure due to unexpected traffic spikes or outages.
• Maintain, support and evolve the existing platforms and support the development of our digital first customer focused strategy.
• Work to continuously improve all aspects of technology, people, systems, processes.
• Lead with a people first approach, developing a high-calibre team through effective recruitment, training, and coaching.
• Ensure appropriate security levels are maintained for data, access controls and intrusion prevention in line with internal policies and regulation such as GDPR.
• You’ll always be learning, improving your skills and the systems you work with.
• You will promote a team culture of an inclusive, diverse, high performing and respectful working environment.

Key Measures of Success:

• Team Alignment – Digital Factory strategy, product roadmap, delivery methodology and controls, and commercial targets.
• Team utilization – Resource allocation and cost control (internal and delivery partner).
• Site KPIs: Platform uptime, Incident response time, incident resolution time, meantime between failures, meantime to recover.
• Product KPIs: Conversation rate, Product usage, Bandwidth utilization, site and app telemetry.
• Customer Experience KPIs: Customer experience index, Customer Journey friction measurement, Customer retention ratio.
• People Health – Work distribution and engagement scores.

Key Skills and Experience:

• Proven experience in a similar position in Technology. Experience in the Online Betting and/or Gaming industries ideally.
• Provide leadership for Site reliability, Platform Engineering work alongside and implement BCR and digital ITL strategy.
• Understand the underlying concepts of systems administration and be familiar with the automation used to manage modern digital infrastructure and digital operational practices.
• Demonstrable knowledge of how applications and services run in real world production environments.
• A deep understanding of monitoring & observability.
• An obsession with our customers, and the impact they feel when things go wrong.
• You’ll know how to operate systems at scale regardless of platform.
• Ability to nurture and enhance the capabilities of your team, ensure you grow their skills and support their career development.
• Excellent communication and decision-making skills.
• An ability to nurture and enhance the capabilities of your team, ensuring you grow their skills and support their career development.
• You thrive on responsibility and completing tasks in a timely manner with good, clear communication.
• You are equally comfortable working independently, and in a team to deliver excellence, working across boundaries and also within the Digital Factory Leadership Team.
• Your ability to set priorities and focus teams on what is most important whilst maintaining resilience under pressure will be key for this role.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, able to understand and relay strategic objectives and plans and drive alignment.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, including the ability to explain complex technical challenges in a simple and effective manner.

Here is our list of benefits:

• 34 days paid leave (This includes bank holidays).
• 2 x Life Days.
• 4 x Salary of Life Insurance.
• Pension: We’ll contribute 8.5%.
• BUPA.
• £500 wellness allowance.
• Income Protection.

As part of our onboarding processes, all successful candidates will need to complete both a Pre-Employment Screening process and a Fit & Proper check by the Gambling Commission. These checks include a DBS (an enhanced check, which shows convictions and conditional cautions), credit and social media checks. As part of our application process, you will be asked to identify in advance if you have spent or unspent convictions that we need to be aware of.

Should you not disclose convictions at the application stage, not pass the Fit & Proper Check process or not complete your Pre-Employment Screening then unfortunately you may not pass our probation process.

All data will be handled in accordance with our data policies and treated with utmost confidentiality.