Graduate Delivery Manager in Cardiff

The delivery function at Critical Cloud needs to be built, not inherited. You'd be the first Graduate DM, working directly with the COO to build the processes, documentation, and customer relationships that hold the whole operation together. Real ownership from week one. Not a training programme.

About the Role

Critical Support is our flagship managed service. This role owns the delivery of it, keeping customers informed, SLAs on track, and the operational engine running smoothly. It's the connective tissue between our SRE team and the customers they serve. We are the world's first "Powered by Datadog" accredited MSP, a Datadog-native cloud managed service provider built for European tech-led SMBs. Our founders have scaled and exited multiple technology businesses. We operate lean, move fast, and take observability seriously. This is a graduate-entry delivery management role working directly under Andrew Phillips, COO.

You'll own the customer-facing side of service delivery, onboarding, reporting, service reviews, escalation management, and the processes that hold everything together. You won't be writing Terraform, but you'll need to understand what our engineers are doing well enough to represent it to customers and flag when something's off.

What You're Delivering

• 24/7 observability across customer infrastructure.
• Alerts, dashboards, and SLOs configured and maintained by our SRE team.
• Cloud Operations Managed AWS and Azure environments.
• Incident response, change management, and infrastructure operations on behalf of the customer.
• Structured SEV-based incident response with postmortem discipline, customer communications, and SLA accountability under our IMS framework.

What You'll Do

• Own the end-to-end delivery experience for a portfolio of Critical Support customers, you're the face of the service.
• Lead customer onboarding: coordinate across SRE, commercial, and the customer's technical team to get new accounts live and well-instrumented.
• Run monthly and quarterly service reviews, preparing reporting packs, presenting SLA/SLO performance, and identifying improvement actions.
• Track and manage service delivery against contracted SLAs, escalating to the SRE team and COO when at risk.
• Act as the first escalation point for customer concerns, triaging, communicating, and coordinating resolution without technical hand-holding.
• Maintain the change management calendar: coordinating planned changes, customer approvals, and CAB participation in line with our ISO 27001 IMS.
• Own service delivery documentation, runbooks, onboarding packs, RACI matrices, and meeting records, kept accurate and audit-ready.
• Work with the COO on service improvement initiatives: identifying patterns in incidents, customer feedback, and operational metrics to sharpen delivery.
• Support the commercial team with renewal and upsell context, you'll know your customers better than anyone.
• Contribute to developing and refining Critical Cloud's delivery processes as we scale the customer base.

Service Lifecycle Ownership

• Customer Onboarding
• Service Governance
• Reporting & Reviews
• Renewal & Growth

Metrics You'll Own

• SLA Adherence
• Customer Health
• CSAT & NPS
• Onboarding Time to Live
• Days from contract to monitored Retention
• Net Revenue Retention
• Renewals & expansions

Requirements

• A degree in any discipline, Business, Management, Engineering, or Computer Science all fit well.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, you'll be in front of customer CTOs and technical teams.
• Natural organisational instinct: you track things, follow up without being chased, and hate loose ends.
• Comfortable working with data: producing reports, spotting trends, and presenting findings clearly.
• Tech-literate enough to understand what our SREs are doing, curiosity matters more than deep knowledge.
• Right to work in the UK without sponsorship.

Nice to Have

• Placement year or internship in a technical or IT services environment.
• Awareness of service management or structured delivery practice.
• Experience with project or service management tooling (Jira, Linear, Notion, or similar).
• Familiarity with cloud concepts, AWS, Azure, or basic infrastructure principles.
• Exposure to ISO 27001 or similar compliance/governance frameworks.
• Any customer-facing work experience, even outside tech.

Who Thrives Here

The best delivery managers we've worked with share one trait: they make complexity invisible to customers. When something goes wrong, the customer hears from you before they notice. When something's at risk, you've already escalated internally. You're not a gatekeeper, you're the person who makes sure both sides of the relationship get what they need.

You'll be working directly with Andrew Phillips, COO, someone who has built and scaled a managed service before. You'll get real exposure to how a cloud MSP operates commercially and operationally, not a training programme or a shadow role. Expect to be given genuine ownership fast. This isn't a purely administrative role. You'll be expected to develop a real working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, Datadog, and SRE practice over time, not to become an engineer, but to be a credible partner to the customers and technical teams you're working with every day.

Start Graduate Delivery Manager Year 1-2 Delivery Manager Critical Support Year 2-3 Senior DM or Head of Delivery Year 3+ VP Delivery or Customer Success.

Base salary DOE Remote -first UK-based, async-friendly Certs funded 25 days holiday + bank holidays plus a paid day off in your birthday month, taken in the month it falls. Holiday grows with tenure: +1 day per year after your second work anniversary, up to 28 days total. Enhanced maternity pay: 26 weeks at your full basic salary. Enhanced paternity pay: 2 weeks at your full basic salary. Datadog awareness, AWS, and Azure certifications funded by the company, you need platform literacy to do this role credibly, and the company pays for it. Contractual, not discretionary. Flexible working requests from your first day of employment, statutory right, supported in full. Company-provided laptop and peripherals, set up before you start.

How We Work

• Customer First: Every decision about how you run a service review or handle an escalation should start with: what does this look like from the customer's side? If the customer doesn't know we're working on their problem, we're not communicating enough.
• Own the Problem: When a customer raises an issue, you don't pass it to the SRE team and wait. You track it, update the customer proactively, and elevate if it's not moving. Problems don't get passed along, they get owned until they're resolved.
• Earn Trust by Delivering: Every SLA report and service review is a moment where the customer decides whether to trust us with more. Consistency builds that trust. Deliver on the basics, every time, and the relationship compounds.
• Move with Urgency: A slow response to a customer question creates anxiety that compounds. Even "we're looking at it" is better than silence. Speed of communication is itself a service quality metric, and it's one you own directly.

Join the pipeline: We're not actively hiring right now, but we keep applications on file. The cover letter matters most: tell us what draws you to delivery management in a cloud MSP context, and how you think about keeping customers and technical teams aligned. No templates. Pipeline open. Cover letter required. Direct to founders.