IT Service Lead in 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 involves owning 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 ensuring 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.

Your 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, 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.
• 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.
• Are highly proficient with Jira Service Management, comfortable designing workflows, automations, SLAs, queues, and reporting.
• Have 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Are a strong communicator who can translate between end-users, IT engineers, security, and senior leadership.
• Share our values: ownership, initiative, dedication to mission, speed, and inclusiveness.

Nice to have:

• Experience administering Jira Service Management at scale.
• Experience with AI tooling such as Atlassian Intelligence, Microsoft Copilot, or custom LLM-based agents.
• Familiarity with ITIL or similar service management frameworks.
• Hands-on background supporting macOS, Windows, iOS, M365, and MDM tools.
• Scripting or low-code automation experience.
• 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. 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, operating in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements and constraints. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world.

What we offer includes competitive salary and VSOP options, relocation support, learning allowances, health and wellness benefits, enhanced parental leave, family support, and a hands-on onboarding program.

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.