IT Service Lead IT London

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously.

We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications.

The role

As Helsing's IT Support Lead, you will own the day-to-day delivery, performance, and experience of IT support across our European offices. You'll lead a distributed team of IT Support staff covering on-site, on-call, and triage responsibilities making sure every Helsing employee gets fast, high-quality help, and that every ticket makes our service better the next time around. 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'll 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

• Own 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.
• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of IT Support Engineers across the UK and Germany, including on-site staff, triage, and on-call rotations.
• Design and manage rotas; on-call, triage, and site coverage. Balancing fairness, coverage, and team wellbeing across multiple offices and time zones.
• Own ITʼs Jira Service Management as a product: queues, request types, workflows, automation rules, SLAs, forms, customer portals, and reporting.
• Define, maintain, and continuously improve escalation paths between L1/L2/L3 support, IT Engineering, Security, and external vendors including clear ownership, response expectations, and communication standards during major incidents.
• Build and own 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.
• Identify and deploy AI agents and automation (within Jira, M365, and our wider toolchain) to deflect repetitive tickets, accelerate triage, draft responses, and surface insights from ticket data.
• Continuously raise the bar on the end-user support experience. Clear comms, fast resolutions, great self-service, and a polished, consistent feel across every interaction.
• Equally raise the bar on the IT staff experience. Better tooling, clearer runbooks, sensible on-call load, meaningful career growth, and protection from avoidable toil.
• Partner with IT Engineering to turn recurring issues into permanent fixes and with Security to ensure support processes meet our compliance and audit obligations.
• Own and evolve 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.
• Are highly proficient with Jira Service Management, comfortable designing workflows, automations, SLAs, queues, and reporting, not just using them.
• Have a strong, demonstrable track record of running support as a data-driven function, defining the right KPIs, building dashboards, and using metrics to drive real operational improvements.
• Have hands-on experience deploying AI agents, chatbots, or automation to improve ticket deflection, triage, or response quality.
• Have managed rotas across on-call, triage, and on-site responsibilities, ideally across multiple locations or time zones.
• Have designed and operated clear escalation processes, including major incident handling and cross-team coordination.
• Bring a customer-first mindset paired with strong operational discipline — you care equally about user experience and team health.
• Are a strong communicator who can translate between end-users, IT engineers, security, and senior leadership.
• Your personal values match ours: ownership, initiative, dedication to mission, speed, and inclusiveness.
• Feel strongly about the right of democracies to defend their sovereignty through the fielding of capabilities that bolster deterrence and decisive action.

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 — used pragmatically, not dogmatically.
• Hands-on background supporting macOS, Windows, iOS, M365 (Entra ID, Exchange, SharePoint), and MDM tools like Intune, Jamf, or JumpCloud.
• Experience working in a regulated environment (defence, government, finance) 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. Helsing’s work is important. You’ll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns. The work is unique. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world. Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward. In our domain, success is a matter of order-of-magnitude improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts.

We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and VSOP options.
• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation.
• Learning: €500/£450 yearly allowance.
• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health).
• Social: regular company events and monthly social allowances.
• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work.
• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled “Infraduction”), in which you will be building tooling and applications to be used across the company. This is your opportunity to learn our tech stack, explore the company, and learn how we get things done - all whilst working with other engineering teams from day one (Specifically for engineering and AI).

These are the core benefits across all locations, there may be additional benefits in certain locations. Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity.

Apply to protect democracies.