IT Service Lead

The role of Helsing's IT Support Lead involves owning the day-to-day delivery, performance, and experience of IT support across our European offices. You will lead a distributed team of IT Support staff covering on-site, on-call, and triage responsibilities, ensuring every Helsing employee receives fast, high-quality help, and that every ticket improves our service for the future.

You will be hands-on with Jira Service Management, fluent in using data to drive decisions, and an early adopter of AI agents and automation to scale the team's impact without scaling headcount linearly. You will set the standard for what great internal IT feels like at Helsing for both the staff we support and the IT engineers doing the supporting directly, enabling the engineers, AI specialists, and program managers building capabilities that protect our democracies.

The day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Owning the daily operating rhythm of IT Support: ticket prioritisation, queue health, SLAs, and ensuring the right issues are being worked on by the right people at the right time.
• Leading, coaching, and developing a distributed team of IT Support Engineers across the UK and Germany, including on-site staff, triage, and on-call rotations.
• Designing and managing rotas; balancing fairness, coverage, and team wellbeing across multiple offices and time zones.
• Owning IT's Jira Service Management as a product: queues, request types, workflows, automation rules, SLAs, forms, customer portals, and reporting.
• Defining, maintaining, and continuously improving escalation paths between L1/L2/L3 support, IT Engineering, Security, and external vendors.
• Building and owning the IT Support performance reporting layer: dashboards, KPIs (CSAT, time-to-resolution, first-contact resolution, backlog age, escalation rates), trend analysis, and regular reporting to IT leadership and the wider business.
• Identifying and deploying AI agents and automation to deflect repetitive tickets, accelerate triage, draft responses, and surface insights from ticket data.
• Continuously raising the bar on the end-user support experience with clear communications, fast resolutions, and a polished, consistent feel across every interaction.
• Partnering with IT Engineering to turn recurring issues into permanent fixes and with Security to ensure support processes meet compliance and audit obligations.
• Owning and evolving our internal IT knowledge base, runbooks, and self-service content.

You should apply if you have:

• 5+ years of experience in IT Support, including 2+ years leading or managing a support team in a fast-paced environment.
• High proficiency with Jira Service Management, comfortable designing workflows, automations, SLAs, queues, and reporting.
• A strong track record of running support as a data-driven function, defining the right KPIs, building dashboards, and using metrics to drive operational improvements.
• Hands-on experience deploying AI agents, chatbots, or automation to improve ticket deflection, triage, or response quality.
• Experience managing rotas across on-call, triage, and on-site responsibilities, ideally across multiple locations or time zones.
• Designed and operated clear escalation processes, including major incident handling and cross-team coordination.
• A customer-first mindset paired with strong operational discipline.
• Strong communication skills to translate between end-users, IT engineers, security, and senior leadership.
• Personal values that match ours: ownership, initiative, dedication to mission, speed, and inclusiveness.

Nice to Have:

• Experience administering Jira Service Management at scale, including integrations with Slack, M365, identity providers, and MDM tooling.
• Experience with AI tooling such as Atlassian Intelligence, Microsoft Copilot, or custom LLM-based agents in a support context.
• Familiarity with ITIL or similar service management frameworks.
• Hands-on background supporting macOS, Windows, iOS, M365, and MDM tools.
• Experience working in a regulated environment with associated audit and compliance requirements.
• Experience scaling an IT Support function inside a fast-growing engineering organisation.

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields. Our work is important, contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing ethical and geopolitical concerns. We operate in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital.

What we offer includes a competitive salary, VSOP options, relocation support, and a yearly learning allowance.