IT Service Lead

Helsing is a defence AI company dedicated to protecting democracies through technological leadership. We believe in thoughtful development and deployment of powerful technologies such as AI, and we pursue robust, ethical, and responsible solutions. Our team is composed of engineers, AI specialists, and customer‑facing programme managers who collaborate to solve complex, high‑impact problems.

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 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the daily operating rhythm of IT Support: ticket prioritisation, queue health, SLAs, and ensuring the right issues are 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 IT’s 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 with clear communication, 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 compliance and audit obligations.
• Own and evolve our internal IT knowledge base, runbooks and self‑service content.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in IT Support, including 2+ years leading or managing a support team in a fast‑paced environment.
• Highly proficient with Jira Service Management, comfortable designing workflows, automations, SLAs, queues and reporting, not just using them.
• Strong, demonstrable 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.
• Customer‑first mindset paired with strong operational discipline – caring equally about user experience and team health.
• Strong communicator who can translate between end‑users, IT engineers, security and senior leadership.
• Personal values match ours: ownership, initiative, dedication to mission, speed and inclusiveness. You feel strongly about the right of democracies to defend their sovereignty through technology.

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 (EntraID, Exchange, SharePoint) and MDM tools like Intune, Jamf or JumpCloud.
• Scripting or low‑code automation experience (PowerShell, Python, Jira automation, Power Automate, Workato etc.).
• 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.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and VSOP options.
• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and four weeks temporary accommodation.
• Learning allowance: €500/£450 yearly.
• 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: five days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work.
• Hands‑on onboarding program – “Infraduction” – building tooling and applications used across the company from day one.

Equal Opportunity & Privacy

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. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation. Helsinki’s Candidate Privacy and Confidentiality Regime applies.