Senior Director, Technology Operations in Guildford

About Sycurio

Sycurio is a global leader in secure, frictionless payment solutions that empower enterprises to enhance customer experience and simplify compliance. Its patented cloud‑based technologies protect sensitive data across all customer interactions and channels, ensuring compliance with industry standards such as PCI DSS while reducing fraud risk and strengthening trust. Founded in 2009 as Semafone, Sycurio supports organizations in over 50 countries across five continents, partnering with leading brands worldwide. Backed by major investor Livingbridge, Sycurio continues to pioneer solutions that make payments secure and seamless.

We are creating a single, accountable owner for everything Sycurio has deployed and running at a client, internally known as the "Run" function. Today the functions that keep our live service healthy (platform, DevOps, support, and service delivery) operate as separate silos, each touching the customer without a cohesive view. This role brings them together. You own the reliability, evolution, and cost‑efficiency of the running estate, you break those silos down, and you lead the shift from a reactive, ticket‑driven operation to a proactive, reliability‑led one. Critically, that estate includes the real‑time voice and telephony infrastructure on which Sycurio's patented DTMF‑masking technology sits, alongside the cloud and on‑prem systems around it. Keeping that infrastructure secure, available, and evolving is at the core of this role.

A telephony lead and specialist team sit within your function and hold the hands‑on voice expertise; you provide the technical leadership across the voice estate, owning its direction and architectural decisions. This is a hands‑on leadership role, not a purely managerial one. At the outset there is no Head of Support and no internal DevOps lead beneath you: Support is delivered today through our outsourced engineering partner, and DevOps is currently run entirely by that partner. You will personally set direction and make the technical calls across support, DevOps, and the estate from day one, and build the leadership beneath you over time. You will own the run‑side relationship with our outsourced engineering partner, and you will be the named operational interface between Engineering (build), InfoSec (security), and our commercial teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Service ownership and reliability: Be the single accountable owner for the health of the live client service; define and hold SLAs/SLOs and a mature incident, problem, and change‑management practice. Own major‑incident response and the out‑of‑hours/on‑call model for the live service, acting as the senior escalation point. Replace firefighting with proactive reliability: root‑cause discipline, observability, and measurable reductions in downtime and change‑failure rate.
• Platform, telephony, and estate: Own the evolution of the on‑prem and cloud estate against a quarterly roadmap; treat the platform as a product with a single accountable owner. Own the real‑time voice/telephony infrastructure (SBCs, SIP trunks, media processing, carrier interconnects) as a first‑class part of that estate, held to the same reliability, security, and roadmap discipline, with the telephony lead and specialists owning the hands‑on engineering. Lead the rationalisation and modernisation of a large, heterogeneous estate (many VMs and numerous bespoke deployments) and deliver its migration ahead of end‑of‑life deadlines. Establish hardening and patching as an automated, low‑churn discipline (co‑owned with InfoSec), eliminating today's manual rollbacks and instability.
• DevOps and developer experience (run side): Take over and shape the run‑side DevOps function, currently delivered by the outsourced partner: reliable CI/CD, environments, and golden paths for the running estate; partner with Engineering on release readiness; and assess where insourcing adds value over time.
• Support: Own the Support and SRE function directly at the outset (delivered via the outsourced partner), moving it from a reactive to a proactive model with clear reliability interfaces, and hire a Head of Support as the function matures.
• Partner and vendor management: Own the run‑side operating model with the outsourced partner: SLAs, quality gates, capacity, and cost; be the single point of contact for run delivery, and hold a clear view on what to insource and when.
• Building and leading the team: Build out the leadership and specialist bench beneath you over time: the Head of Support, the telephony specialist team, and selective insourcing of DevOps, in line with growth and budget. Set the operating rhythm, engineering and reliability standards, and career development for the function.
• Cross‑functional leadership: Be the named interface across Engineering (the build‑to‑BAU operational‑readiness handoff), InfoSec (co‑owned security operations), and the commercial organisation: the person who makes the components deployed at a client work as one system.

What success looks like in the first 12 months:

• The running estate has a single owner, a roadmap, and measurably fewer incidents and rollbacks.
• The voice/telephony estate is under the same reliability and security discipline as the rest of the platform, with the specialist team established.
• The end‑of‑life migration is planned and underway, with the estate materially rationalised and standardised.
• Patching and hardening run as a scheduled, automated discipline rather than reactive churn.
• The previously siloed client‑facing functions operate from one cohesive service view.
• A defined build‑to‑BAU operational‑readiness bar is in place, agreed with Engineering and Architecture.
• The outsourced‑partner run‑side relationship has a clear, measured operating model, with a considered view on what to insource.
• Run‑side service delivery (including telephony) is stabilised, with a clear operating interface to Customer Delivery's managed‑service offer.
• Early leadership hires (starting with the Head of Support) are scoped or underway.

Experience Required

Essential:

• Senior leadership in technology operations, platform / SRE, or service delivery, ideally in a SaaS or managed‑service / MSP setting.
• Proven ownership of a real‑time, availability‑critical production estate (on‑prem or hybrid) that depends on third‑party providers you do not control (carriers, networks, exchanges, or payment rails), with deep monitoring, capacity, and incident discipline.
• Hands‑on and technical: able to set direction and make architectural trade‑offs yourself, and to run support and DevOps directly until you have leads beneath you. This is not a role for a pure people‑manager or a delegator.
• Understands real‑time voice/session infrastructure well enough to direct a specialist team and hold it to account, even without being hands‑on in it day to day.
• Track record managing outsourced / offshore delivery partners to SLAs and quality gates, with a clear view on when to insource.
• Strong incident / problem / change discipline (ITIL‑informed, pragmatically applied, not bureaucratic), including major‑incident and on‑call ownership.
• A strong cross‑functional operator who builds alignment across engineering, security, and commercial teams: the silo‑breaker.

Desirable:

• Hands‑on background with voice/telephony infrastructure: SBCs, SIP, media processing, and carrier interconnects.
• Experience running a comparably real‑time, provider‑dependent estate in an adjacent domain: carrier / telco network operations, CPaaS (voice and messaging), payment or transaction switching, low‑latency trading / market‑data, or live streaming / broadcast.
• Experience in regulated or security‑sensitive environments (payments, PCI DSS, fintech, contact‑centre technology).
• Experience building or insourcing a function from an outsourced baseline.

Additional Information

This will be a Hybrid role with a requirement to attend our Guildford office 1 day per week and based on business need.