Head of IT in London

Position: Permanent (Full time)

Location: Hybrid | London Bridge | Global Scope

We are looking for an engineer who has become a leader. You will own our global Corporate IT estate - Microsoft 365, Azure, networking, telephony, identity and endpoints - and build and grow a team with strong engineering instincts. This is not a role for someone who has drifted from engineering into pure governance. We want someone with the authority to discuss strategy at a leadership meeting in the morning, and the technological credibility to help the team solve a problem with Intune in the afternoon.

We have over 500 users, spread across the globe. Some are in offices, but hundreds are not. We're mostly on Dell and Windows today, but the Mac population is growing quickly. The Corporate IT team is currently six, split between the UK and South Africa.

Plenty works well, but some things only work because somebody remembers to do something manually on a Tuesday. We need someone who instinctively knows which of those things to tackle first, and which are OK to continue living with. The service desk component is a major part of the team's work; but we have a long project list and not enough time to execute on it. By delivering more scalable service processes, you'll free up the team to concentrate on the longer term work.

What you will do

• Build and lead
• Take direct ownership of the Microsoft 365, networking and endpoint estate worldwide.
• Recruit, mentor and retain a team of six across two continents, and raise its technical bar.
• Set direction, and be able to defend it on the technical detail.
• Automate the estate
• Replace manual processes with proper tooling: PowerShell, the Graph API, Intune, Slack automations, and more.
• Treat Corporate IT with engineering discipline - version control, documentation, logging.
• Make the call on whether ten lines of PowerShell is easier than buying a brand new software contract; and if so, help someone on the team to write those lines.
• Deliver the work already in front of us
• Software deployment discipline. A Mac user should not be asked for an administrator's password every time Slack updates itself.
• A refresh of the audio-visual estate at the London office.
• Asset management and lifecycle planning, treated as an engineering problem as much as an administrative one.
• Own the business of IT
• Direct a multi-million-pound budget: forecasting, cost control and supplier performance.
• Negotiate with vendors, in close partnership with our procurement function.
• Lead major projects — service transitions, tooling rollouts, disaster recovery — with the standing to be trusted on the technical detail and on the numbers alike.
• Partner with InfoSec, which also reports to the CTO, on security posture and compliance
• Set the tone
• Represent Corporate IT within the wider technology leadership, as a peer to our engineering leaders.
• Make the department somewhere good people want to stay.
• Build an IT function the rest of the business knows and respects.

What you bring

• Essential
• A genuine technical background: you have built things, broken them and fixed them again, and you are still comfortable in a shell or a console when it is called for.
• Fluency with Microsoft 365, Azure, networking, and endpoint management across both Windows and macOS.
• A demonstrated instinct for automation, and the habit of using it to eliminate manual work.
• Senior leadership experience in Corporate IT, within a multi-site or international organisation, with a record of modernisation actually delivered.
• The presence to lead a team, negotiate with vendors, and hold your own with senior leadership across the business.
• Experience supporting a distributed international user base.
• A substantial budget under your own management, and accountability for it.
• Nice to have
• Formal procurement experience.
• Familiarity with ISO 27001, ITIL and comparable frameworks.
• Experience of M&A integration or other complex organisational change.
• Scaled service desk operations, and Zendesk in particular.
• Qualifications such as Microsoft, Cisco or ITIL
• A history of successful automation, scripts or tooling projects

Where you'll sit

• Hybrid working: two to three days a week at our London Bridge office, with occasional collaboration across time zones.
• A visible leadership role with real autonomy and a genuine mandate to change how things are done.
• A seat in our technology leadership group, reporting directly to the CTO.

Some of Our Global Benefits

• Parental leave
• Medical benefits
• Paid sick leave
• Dotdigital day
• Share reward
• Wellbeing reward
• Wellbeing Days
• Loyalty reward

DEI commitment

As an equal opportunities employer we are committed to equality in all its practices with regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

Legal statement

No agencies/recruiters please. We are only accepting applications directly from the applicants. If you are a recruiter, please refrain from reaching out to our staff about this position. Anything contrary will be treated as unsolicited approach under the applicable data protection law.