UK

United Kingdom · Technology and data · Lead (8-12 years)

Lead IT Operations Engineer

Here is the whole job, in plain words. What it is, what you decide, how you're judged, how people get here and where they go next. Then the part no course gives you: twelve AI tutors who learn your work.

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  • Experience bandLead (8-12 years)
  • Direct reports3-8 reports
  • Reports toIT Operations Manager
  • UK framework levelUsually a manager, or the deepest specialist in a team

Also advertised as Staff Site Reliability Engineer · Principal Operations Engineer · IT Operations Technical Lead · Infrastructure Lead Engineer

Built on 43,079 real UK job descriptions we analysed · grounded in what real qualifications cover

Two short quizzes about you

1From this job to a course

The qualifications matched to this job

EAL Level 2 Certificate In Engineering Technologies Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 2 of 11 standards
EAL Level 2 Diploma In Engineering Technologies Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 1 of 11 standards
EAL Level 2 Certificate in Engineering Operations (Knowledge) Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 1 of 11 standards
EAL Level 2 First Certificate in Engineering Technology Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 1 of 11 standards
EAL Level 2 Diploma in Engineering Operations (Knowledge) Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 1 of 11 standards
EAL Level 2 First Diploma in Engineering Technology Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · Level 2 · covers 1 of 11 standards

Matched from the standards this job is measured against: a suggestion, not an official ruling.

The units you would start with

Leading a team in Engineering EAL Level 2 Certificate In Engineering Technologies

The future skills this job leans on

AI Fluency working with AI as a thinking partner
Data Fluency turning numbers into a decision
Automation Fluency building AI into how work runs
Systems Fluency seeing the whole picture

2AI and this work

Will AI change your work as a Lead IT Operations Engineer?

Nobody can say exactly how. Here is what this job is being asked for next, and where to start.

The new skills this role is being asked for

  • Advanced AIOps & Observability Engineering
  • Platform Engineering Principles & Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)
Why each one is rising

The future skills this job leans on

We'll only ever tell you what we can actually back up. No hype, no scare tactics.

What happens when you start

Next, a free account. We build your Lead IT Operations Engineer plan as you set up, starting with the free Automation Fluency module. No card.

Your first Future Fluency module is free. After that, your AI tutor is £70 a month.

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Keep this read. One email with what AI is changing in this job, the new skills it asks for and where to start free. Nothing else follows unless you confirm your address.

3What this role really is

A Lead IT Operations Engineer designs and builds the infrastructure that keeps core services running. The work covers making systems efficient, resilient, and able to handle the unexpected. It involves leading by example and setting the technical standard for others to follow.

4What you'd actually use

The tools this job runs on, and how well you'd need to know each one.

ServiceNow / Jira Service Management Advanced

Designing and building new workflows for incident, problem, and change management. Creating custom reports for operational metrics. Configuring CMDB relationships and managing service catalog items. You're shaping how we use the platform.

Datadog / New Relic / Splunk Expert

Creating complex monitors and synthetic tests, building custom dashboards for critical services, writing advanced search queries (e.g., SPL for Splunk), and tuning alert thresholds to reduce noise. You're defining our observability strategy.

AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, RDS, EKS) / Azure (VMs, Blob, Entra ID, VNet, SQL DB, AKS) Expert

Managing auto-scaling groups, configuring complex VPCs/VNets and security groups, writing advanced IAM/Entra ID policies, optimising instance types and storage tiers. You're architecting solutions across our cloud footprint.

Terraform / Ansible Expert

Writing complex, reusable Terraform modules and Ansible roles from scratch. Managing state files securely, and implementing CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure deployment. You're championing IaC best practices.

Docker / Kubernetes (K8s) Advanced

Writing Dockerfiles, managing container registries, deploying applications using Helm charts, and troubleshooting complex cluster issues (e.g., networking, storage, scheduling). You're ensuring our containerised applications run smoothly.

Power BI / Tableau Advanced

Creating operational dashboards for team and stakeholder visibility (e.g., uptime, ticket volume, cloud spend). You'll be presenting these to leadership, so they need to be clear and insightful.

5What you get to decide, and how that grows

Power in a job isn't your title. It's what you're allowed to decide. Here's how it grows as you move up.

The choiceComing in Where you are nowThe step above
Technical Architecture Follows existing architectural patterns; flags deviations. Proposes minor architectural adjustments; gets approval from senior engineers. Designs and implements significant architectural components; consults Lead/Staff on major changes.
Budget Allocation (within domain) No authority; flags cost concerns. Recommends cost-saving measures; no spending authority. Recommends spend up to £5K; needs approval for more.
Incident Response Strategy Executes runbook steps; escalates when unsure. Troubleshoots independently using runbooks; identifies need for new runbooks. Leads P2/P3 incident resolution; contributes to RCA; designs new runbooks.
Hiring & Team Development No involvement. Provides peer feedback on candidates. Conducts technical interviews; mentors junior engineers.

6How you'll be judged

The scoreboard, and what is not on it. The hard targets, how often each is actually looked at, and the quiet signals that never reach a dashboard.

System Uptime/Availability for Critical Services
The percentage of time our most important services are fully operational and accessible to users.
Target · Maintain 99.99% ('four nines') availability for Tier 1 services within your domain.

If your domain includes our customer-facing web application, you'd be looking at its uptime. Hitting 99.99% means less than 52 minutes of downtime in a whole year. Anything less, and we'll be asking why.

Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for P1/P2 Incidents
The average time it takes to restore service after a critical incident has been detected.
Target · Reduce MTTR for P1 incidents by 20% year-over-year, aiming for under 30 minutes.

If a major database goes down, how quickly can your team get it back up? We're tracking the clock from alert to full recovery. A P1 incident that took 45 minutes to resolve last quarter should ideally be 36 minutes or less next time.

Automation Rate for Operational Tasks
The percentage of repetitive, manual operational tasks that have been successfully automated.
Target · Automate 60% of recurring manual operational tasks within your domain over the next 12 months.

If your team spends 10 hours a week on manual server patching, automating 6 hours of that would be a 60% automation rate for that specific task. We want to see you building the tools that eliminate toil.

Cloud Cost Optimisation (within domain)
The efficiency of our cloud spend, ensuring we're getting the most value for money.
Target · Identify and implement cost savings initiatives to reduce cloud spend by £50K-£100K annually within your managed infrastructure.

This could mean rightsizing EC2 instances, optimising S3 storage tiers, or making smart use of Reserved Instances. You'd track the actual spend against a baseline and report on the savings you've achieved.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship
How effectively you guide and develop your team members, and set technical standards.
  • You'll be seen as the go-to person for complex technical challenges. Your team members show clear growth in their skills and autonomy. You're regularly providing constructive feedback and leading technical deep-dives. Other teams will come to you for advice on best practices, not just solutions.
Architectural Soundness & Resilience
The quality and robustness of the infrastructure designs you create and implement.
  • New infrastructure deployments are stable from day one, with minimal post-launch issues. Your designs are well-documented, scalable, and secure. You proactively identify and mitigate single points of failure. Your solutions are maintainable and easy for others to understand and support.
Proactive Problem Solving
Your ability to anticipate and address potential issues before they become critical incidents.
  • You're regularly proposing and implementing improvements based on trend analysis from monitoring data. You're leading post-mortems that identify systemic issues and drive long-term fixes, not just quick patches. You're spotting 'drift' in our environments and putting in place automated remediation.

7Would you like it

Both sides. What people enjoy, and what grinds them down.

What people enjoy
Building Resilient Systems

You'll spend your days designing fault-tolerant architectures, implementing robust monitoring, and automating recovery processes. Seeing a system you designed gracefully handle a failure brings you genuine satisfaction.

You're excited by the prospect of architecting a multi-region disaster recovery solution that can withstand an entire cloud region going offline, ensuring zero downtime for our customers.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

You thrive on guiding junior engineers, helping them solve complex problems, and watching them grow. You enjoy setting technical standards and seeing your team adopt best practices you've championed.

You love leading deep-dive sessions on Kubernetes networking or advanced Terraform patterns, patiently explaining concepts and empowering your team to tackle bigger challenges.

Solving Complex Technical Puzzles

When a weird, intermittent production issue crops up, you're the first to roll up your sleeves and dig in. You enjoy the challenge of debugging distributed systems and finding elegant solutions to tricky problems.

You're energised by figuring out why a microservice is intermittently failing under specific load conditions, tracing it through multiple layers of infrastructure and application code.

What frustrates people
  • The 3 AM Page: Being woken up for an automated alert that turns out to be a false positive or a non-critical issue that could have waited until morning. It happens, and it's annoying.
  • "Code Over the Wall" Syndrome: Development teams releasing new application versions without consulting Ops, leading to unforeseen performance issues, resource contention, or outright failures in production. You'll spend time fixing things that could have been avoided.
  • The Unfunded Mandate: Being tasked with achieving five-nines (99.999%) of uptime for a critical service while being denied the budget for the necessary redundant hardware or software. It's a constant battle.
  • Blame Deflection: Automatically being blamed for any application slowness or failure, forcing you to spend hours proving the infrastructure is healthy and the issue lies within the application code. You'll need a thick skin and solid evidence.
  • Shadow IT Cleanup: Discovering a business-critical process is running on an unmanaged, insecure server under someone's desk or on a personal cloud account, and now it's your problem to support and secure it. It's never glamorous.
  • The "Just" Request: Stakeholders asking you to "just quickly" bypass the change management process for a seemingly minor tweak, underestimating the potential blast radius of a small mistake. You'll need to stand your ground.
What this role does not give you
  • A purely greenfield environment: You'll be working with existing systems, some of which are quite old, alongside building new ones. It's a mix.
  • Complete control over product roadmap: While you'll influence it heavily, the final product decisions usually sit elsewhere.
  • A 9-to-5, no-interruptions schedule: Incidents don't care about your plans, and on-call rotations are a reality.

8Who you work with

This role directly impacts our service reliability, operational efficiency, and overall security posture. Your decisions on architecture, automation, and tooling can literally save or cost the company millions in downtime or cloud spend. You're building the roads and bridges for all our digital services, so getting it right means the business can move fast and safely.

Inside the business
  • IT Operations Manager (your direct boss, for strategic alignment)
  • Development Team Leads (to understand application needs and deployment pipelines)
  • Product Managers (to understand future features and their infrastructure requirements)
  • Security Team (to ensure all infrastructure meets our security standards)
  • Finance Team (for budget reviews and cloud cost optimisation discussions)
  • Other Lead Engineers (for cross-functional technical alignment)
Outside the business
  • Cloud Service Providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud for technical support and new features)
  • Key Software Vendors (e.g., ServiceNow, Datadog for platform support and integration)
  • External Auditors (occasionally, for compliance checks)

9What you need before you start

Not a wish list. The things you would be expected to already have.

  • You'll need at least 5-8 years of hands-on experience as a Senior IT Operations Engineer or SRE, where you've owned critical services and led major incident resolution.
  • Proven experience designing and implementing complex infrastructure-as-code solutions in a cloud environment (AWS or Azure).
  • Demonstrable experience mentoring junior engineers and leading small technical projects or workstreams.
  • A track record of significantly improving system reliability, reducing MTTR, and driving automation.
  • Strong understanding of ITIL principles, particularly Incident, Problem, and Change Management, and how to apply them pragmatically.
  • Experience presenting technical information and recommendations to senior stakeholders.

10What to practise next

Where the job is going, and what to do about it starting this week.

Advanced Cloud Governance & Cost Management

Multi-cloud environments and increasing cloud spend mean we need tighter governance, automated cost optimisation, and robust chargeback models. It's about getting more value from our cloud investment.

Policy-as-Code (e.g., OPA, AWS Config Rules) · Advanced Cloud Cost Explorer/Billing Analysis · Cross-Account/Multi-Cloud Management

  • This month: Deep-dive into AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management. Find one area for immediate savings.
  • Next quarter: Research and propose a policy-as-code solution for a common compliance requirement.
  • Month 3-6: Build a custom dashboard to track cloud spend by team or project.
  • Month 6-12: Lead a project to implement a new cost allocation or chargeback model.

Quick win: Set up automated alerts for unexpected spikes in cloud spend for your domain. You'll catch issues before they become budget problems.

Kubernetes Ecosystem Mastery

Kubernetes is becoming the standard for container orchestration. As a Lead, you'll need to move beyond basic deployments to advanced cluster management, security, and performance tuning.

Kubernetes Security Best Practices (e.g., Pod Security Standards, Network Policies) · Advanced Helm Chart Development & Management · Cluster Observability & Performance Tuning · GitOps for Kubernetes

  • This month: Take an advanced Kubernetes security course (e.g., CKS certification prep).
  • Next quarter: Lead a project to refactor an existing Helm chart for better reusability and security.
  • Month 3-6: Implement Network Policies in a non-production cluster to restrict traffic between namespaces.
  • Month 6-12: Design and implement a GitOps workflow for managing a critical Kubernetes application.

Quick win: Review and harden the Pod Security Standards for a critical application in one of our Kubernetes clusters. It's a quick win for security.

11Staying current once you are in

What people here do to keep up
  • Regularly attend industry conferences (e.g., KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, SREcon) to stay current with emerging technologies and best practices.
  • Actively participate in online technical communities and forums (e.g., Reddit's r/sysadmin, Stack Overflow) to share knowledge and learn from peers.
  • Contribute to open-source projects, especially those related to infrastructure automation, monitoring, or cloud tooling.
  • Dedicate time each week to 'self-study' – exploring new technologies, experimenting with proof-of-concepts, or reading relevant technical books and articles.
  • Seek out mentorship opportunities, both as a mentee to senior leaders and as a mentor to junior engineers.

12The rising capability

The rising capability

Zavmo analysis

What's rising in its place

This is where the work is heading, and the higher pay with it. Get fluent here and the shift stops being a threat and starts being your edge.

Advanced AIOps & Observability Engineering

Traditional monitoring is no longer enough. The sheer volume of data from distributed systems means we need AI to make sense of it, predict issues, and automate responses. Competitors are already using these tools to achieve higher availability with fewer engineers.

  • Anomaly Detection & Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Automation
  • Predictive Analytics for System Health
  • Automated Remediation & Self-Healing
  • Service Mesh Observability (e.g., Istio, Linkerd)

Platform Engineering Principles & Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)

As our engineering teams grow, we need to provide them with self-service, standardised tools and platforms to deploy and manage their applications safely and efficiently. This shifts Ops from a gatekeeper to an enabler, building the 'paved roads' for developers.

  • Developer Experience (DevEx)
  • Self-Service Infrastructure
  • Standardised Toolchains & Templates
  • FinOps Integration in Platform

13What you’ll use

What you’ll use

Skills this role draws on

Technical

  • ITIL Framework (v3/v4)
  • SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Principles
  • Disaster Recovery (DR) & Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
  • Cloud FinOps
  • Capacity Planning & Performance Tuning
  • IT Governance & Security

14The pathway

The pathway

How you actually get there, here

How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.

  1. 1

    From Senior IT Operations Engineer (L3)

    2-4 years as a Senior Engineer

    Skills to master

    • Moving from owning workstreams to owning entire domains. Developing strong architectural design skills, leading technical initiatives, and effectively mentoring others. Learning to present complex technical topics to senior leadership.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Consistently delivering high-quality, complex technical projects with minimal supervision.
    • Proactively identifying and solving systemic problems, not just symptoms.
    • Being the 'go-to' person for complex technical issues within your team.
    • Demonstrating strong mentorship for junior team members.
    • Successfully leading incident response for major outages.
  2. 2

    From Senior Site Reliability Engineer (L3)

    2-4 years as a Senior SRE

    Skills to master

    • Deepening expertise in SRE principles, particularly around error budgets, SLOs/SLIs, and toil reduction. Expanding scope from specific services to broader infrastructure domains. Developing people leadership and strategic influence.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Successfully implementing automation that significantly reduces toil.
    • Driving the adoption of SRE practices within a team or service.
    • Architecting highly available and scalable services.
    • Effectively collaborating with development teams to improve operational aspects of their applications.
    • Leading blameless post-mortems and driving long-term preventative actions.
  3. 3

    From Technical Lead (from another infrastructure domain)

    3-5 years as a Technical Lead

    Skills to master

    • Adapting existing technical leadership and architectural skills to our specific cloud platforms and operational tooling. Understanding our unique business context and operational challenges. Building credibility within the IT Operations team.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Demonstrable experience leading technical teams and projects in a related infrastructure area.
    • Strong command of cloud architecture and IaC principles.
    • Ability to quickly learn new technical stacks and operational processes.
    • Excellent communication and influencing skills, especially in a new environment.

15Where this role leads

The long view: This role can lead to managing larger teams as a Director of IT Operations, or moving into a senior technical role such as Chief Architect.

The ten Future Fluencies

Zavmo analysis

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

A qualification proves you can do the job as it's defined today. These ten are what decide whether you're still the obvious person for it in five years. They're the capabilities employers are now writing into senior roles faster than people are learning them. Zavmo weaves them through whatever you study, so you come out with both: the credential and the fluency.

The highlighted ones are the Fluencies your role leans on hardest, from how Lead IT Operations Engineer is actually changing.

Where it leads

Roles this leads to

Also named as a next step, with no page in the catalogue yet:

  • Principal Site Reliability Engineer (L5 - Individual Contributor)

How you would learn this

One to one, on the work you already do

A tutor sets the task against your own job and marks the reasoning, at your pace. There is no cohort to fall behind.

A lesson from Leading a team in Engineering, worked against Lead IT Operations Engineer.

Leading a team in Engineering Level 2

Applied to your work in Lead IT Operations Engineer

The objective of this unit is to equip learners with an understanding of the roles, responsibilities, knowledge, and skills required to effectively lead a team in an engineering environment. Learners will explore how to manage team workloads, allocate tasks, and contribute to achieving team goals through effective leadership practices.

How the thinking builds
  1. 1 Remember
  2. 2 Understand
  3. 3 Apply
  4. 4 Analyse
  5. 5 Evaluate
  6. 6 Create
An illustration of a Zavmo lesson, built from this role’s own route. The unit, its objective and every criterion above are the awarding body’s own words, not an example.

It is £70 a month, billed monthly. Your free first module is Future Fluency, and you can cancel any time.

See Your Progress Grow Illustration
Lead IT Operations Engineer
  • ITIL Framework (v3/v4)
  • SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Principles
  • Disaster Recovery (DR) & Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
  • Cloud FinOps
  • Capacity Planning & Performance Tuning
  • IT Governance & Security
This is your Mind Palace on learn.zavmo.ai. Every skill above comes from this role's own record, not an example borrowed from another job. A node lights up when you evidence it, and what you build stays yours between jobs. That is the part a course cannot do.

16The detail, folded away

Everything else the record holds

The career branches in full, how AI is already showing up in the day-to-day, and the questions people ask about this job. Here when you want them, out of the way while you decide.

Where it leads next, rung by rung

Where it leads

The career path, and where it branches

Lead IT Operations Engineer is a start, not a ceiling. Each step below asks for new skills and hands back more autonomy.

  1. IT Operations Manager (L5)

    3-5 years in the Lead IT Operations Engineer role

    This is a significant step into formal people management and broader strategic accountability. You'll move from leading technical initiatives to leading people and owning the overall operational performance for a larger domain or department.

    • Vendor Management Negotiating contracts, managing relationships with key technology partners.
    • Organisational Design Structuring teams for optimal efficiency and scalability.
    • Risk Management Enterprise-level operational risk assessment and mitigation.
    • Financial Modelling Forecasting operational costs and optimising spend across the department.

  2. Principal Site Reliability Engineer (L5 - Individual Contributor)

    3-5 years in the Lead IT Operations Engineer role

    This pathway keeps you deep in the technical weeds, but with a much broader scope and greater influence. You'll be solving the hardest technical problems, setting enterprise-wide standards, and acting as a technical thought leader without direct people management responsibilities.

    • Advanced Performance Engineering Deep optimisation of highly complex, distributed systems.
    • Security Architecture Designing and implementing enterprise-level security controls for infrastructure.
    • Innovation & Research Exploring and evaluating bleeding-edge technologies for future adoption.
    • Patent & Publication Contributing to industry knowledge through patents, papers, or conference presentations.
Working with AI on the job

Working with AI

Where AI is starting to help

Let's be real, IT Operations can be a relentless cycle of alerts, troubleshooting, and manual tasks. But what if you could offload some of that grunt work to an intelligent assistant? We're not talking about replacing you; we're talking about giving you a superpower. Imagine reclaiming hours every week to focus on strategic initiatives, complex architectural problems, or even just getting home on time.

At Zavmo, we're actively exploring and integrating AI tools to make our IT Operations Engineers more efficient and effective. We believe AI isn't just a buzzword; it's a practical way to reduce toil, improve reliability, and free up our brightest minds for the work that truly matters. Here's a glimpse of how AI could change your day-to-day as a Lead IT Operations Engineer:

Intelligent Alert Triage & Correlation

Use AIOps platforms (like Datadog AI or Dynatrace Davis) to automatically correlate dozens of low-level alerts into a single, actionable problem. It can identify the likely root cause before you even start investigating, cutting down on noise and speeding up incident detection. No more sifting through hundreds of alerts to find the needle in the haystack.

Predictive Capacity Analysis

Leverage AI models to analyse historical utilisation trends (CPU, disk, memory) and predict when resources will be exhausted, often weeks in advance. This moves capacity planning from a reactive scramble to a proactive, strategic exercise, preventing performance bottlenecks before they impact users. You'll be able to plan upgrades, not react to outages.

Vulnerability Research & Remediation Assistant

When a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is announced, use an AI assistant to instantly summarise the vulnerability, identify which systems in your CMDB are affected, and even draft a remediation plan based on vendor guidance. This saves hours of manual research and helps you respond to threats much faster and more accurately.

Automated Post-Mortem & RCA Drafting

After a stressful incident, feed an AI model the incident timeline, chat logs (from Slack/Teams), and alert data. The AI can generate a first draft of the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) document, including a summary, timeline, and suggested action items. This significantly reduces the tedious documentation work, letting you focus on preventing the next incident.

Common questions

Common questions

How do you become a Lead IT Operations Engineer?

Common routes in include From Senior IT Operations Engineer (2-4 years as a Senior Engineer), From Senior Site Reliability Engineer (2-4 years as a Senior SRE) and From Technical Lead (from another infrastructure domain) (3-5 years as a Technical Lead). Times vary with prior experience.

Where can a Lead IT Operations Engineer progress to?

This role can lead on to IT Operations Manager (3-5 years in the Lead IT Operations Engineer role) and Principal Site Reliability Engineer (3-5 years in the Lead IT Operations Engineer role), depending on the skills you build.

What new skills matter most for a Lead IT Operations Engineer?

Increasingly, Advanced AIOps & Observability Engineering and Platform Engineering Principles & Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). These are the skills our record of this role lists as growing.

Free tools

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17Where to go from here

Other roles at Level 5

Same depth of qualification, different job. Useful if the work appeals but this particular role does not.

 More jobs in technology and data

Stay in the field you know and move sideways rather than up.
If you leave this industry

The skills involved in this role apply across many industries, including FinTech, e-commerce, SaaS, and traditional enterprise. Every organisation needs reliable IT operations, and knowledge of cloud platforms, automation, and SRE principles carries across sectors.

This role profile is © 2026 Growth Engineering Technologies Ltd. Built from UK occupational standards and regulated qualification data, and written for Zavmo.

You're not behind. You're right on time. The shift is only just beginning. Your role won't look the same in two years. Be the one who leads the change, not the one it happens to. Start my free Automation Fluency module What happens next: a free account, then we build your plan as you set up. No card. Build your plan, see your roadmap and meet the twelve tutors matched to you. All free. When you're ready to start learning, it's £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.