Director of Engineering - InfraOps

The Opportunity As Director of Engineering (InfraOps), you will lead a central function of approximately 45 engineers responsible for Federated InfraOps, Core Infrastructure, Datastores, Service Desk operations, and near 24/7 incident support. This is a leadership role, not a technical-authority role. You will be accountable for the organisational capability, service delivery, operating model, budget, and long-term effectiveness of the InfraOps function. Technical direction is provided through Principal Engineers and specialist technical leaders; your focus is ensuring the organisation, people, processes, governance, and commercial arrangements enable engineering teams to succeed. You will be responsible for creating a predictable, well-governed, and trusted service organisation that supports a large and complex software estate while balancing cost, operational resilience, and service quality. Key Responsibilities: Function Leadership & Operating Model You will: - Own the shape and operating model of the InfraOps function, its structure, roles, service offering and ways of working. - Define and evolve the organisational structure across Federated InfraOps, Core Infrastructure, Datastores and Support. - Establish clear service ownership, routing and escalation paths to remove ambiguity and single points of failure. - Define service boundaries and accountabilities between InfraOps and product engineering teams. - Set objectives, priorities, performance measures, and service expectations aligned to wider Engineering goals. - Escalate ownership, funding and operational risks appropriately to Engineering leadership. People Leadership & Organisational Capability You will lead a distributed organisation spanning the UK, US, India, and third-party partners. Responsibilities include: - Line management and development of InfraOps managers and team leaders. - Workforce planning, succession planning, and organisational design. - Recruitment, skills development, career frameworks, and talent growth across all levels. - Building a collaborative, automation-focused culture across multiple geographies. - Managing partner organisations and outsourced resources to ensure cost-effective, high-quality service delivery. Service Desk, Incident Management & Operational Support You will ensure dependable support services for business-critical applications across the IRIS portfolio. You will: - Own the governance of engineering service desk operations. - Oversee access and licence management processes. - Ensure sustainable on-call and incident response coverage with appropriate escalation paths and runbooks. - Partner with Critical Incident Management teams to deliver effective technical responses during major incidents. - Define and monitor service-level expectations, driving continuous operational improvement. Platform, Supplier & Tooling Management You will have responsibility for engineering-wide platforms, tooling, and supplier relationships. Key accountabilities include: - Commercial ownership of function-wide suppliers and engineering platforms. - Leading supplier renewals, negotiations, licensing reviews and vendor governance. - Driving consolidation toward strategic platforms including Azure, AWS, Jira and GitHub Enterprise. - Cloud cost visibility, FinOps governance, forecasting and optimisation. - Ensuring platform assets remain secure, compliant, patched and operationally effective. Governance, Compliance & Risk Management You will establish and maintain a strong operational control environment. Responsibilities include: - Governance of change management, release enablement, access administration, disaster recovery testing and shared services. - Supporting compliance and assurance initiatives including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR. - Identifying operational, resilience, security and capacity risks and driving mitigation plans. - Partnering with technical leadership to ensure platform standards and controls are adopted consistently. Budget & Commercial Ownership You will own the financial management of the InfraOps function. This includes: - Budget ownership across headcount, contractors, partners and tooling. - Capacity modelling and investment planning. - Providing transparency on costs, service delivery and resource allocation. - Balancing operational demands against finite capacity and budget constraints. - Building and defending business cases for investment in people, tooling and infrastructure. What We're Looking For Essential Experience & Qualifications: - Degree-qualified in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent industry experience. - Previous Director-level (or equivalent senior leadership) experience running an infrastructure, InfraOps or operations function of comparable scale, ideally within SaaS or cloud-native software. - Proven experience (10+ years) in infrastructure, InfraOps or operations engineering, with at least 3 years leading and line-managing managers and teams. Required Knowledge & Experience - Proven experience running a central InfraOps, infrastructure or operations function supporting multiple product teams, ideally across a diverse, M&A-driven portfolio. - Strong track record of designing and evolving team structures and operating models across in-house and partner/offshore resources. - Demonstrable ownership of budgets, headcount and supplier commercials, including renewals, negotiations, licensing and cost optimisation. - Experience running service desk, incident-management and on-call/24-7-oriented support models. - Solid working knowledge of multi-cloud (Azure and AWS) and hybrid/private-cloud environments. - Experience operating within SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR or similar compliance frameworks. - Strong commercial acumen with the ability to articulate the cost and value of engineering operations to senior stakeholders. Key Leadership Competencies Success in this role requires strength in: - Operating-model design - Service ownership and accountability - Pragmatic prioritisation - Distributed team leadership - Management delegation - Talent development and succession planning - Operational governance - Service improvement - Commercial and vendor management - FinOps and cost visibility - Risk management - Financial ownership - Executive stakeholder management - Value articulation and business alignment Personal Attributes We are looking for a leader who is: - Pragmatic, organised and outcome-focused. - Highly effective at building trusted cross-functional relationships. - Comfortable delegating authority and holding teams accountable. - Calm under pressure and skilled at making balanced decisions. - An excellent communicator who can simplify complex operational challenges. - Passionate about developing people and building high-performing teams. Desirable Experience - Experience leading infrastructure consolidation or cloud migration programmes. - Experience managing teams across the UK, US and India. - Familiarity with FinOps practices and product-level cost allocation. - Experience partnering with Principal or Staff-level engineering leaders, maintaining a clear separation between technical authority and functional leadership.