About This Role
Leading the IT team and operations is the core of this role, supporting around 400 employees in a fast-paced, FCA-regulated environment. The IT Director will combine strong technical, operational, and people leadership with a calm, solutions-focused approach under pressure, taking ownership of major incidents and driving continuous improvement.
Responsibilities
- Lead, develop, and motivate the IT team across service desk, infrastructure, and service management
- Review the structure and ways of working and make changes where required
- Build clear ownership, accountability, and calm, effective incident leadership
- Own the service desk and embed proportionate ITIL practices covering incident, problem, change, request, and knowledge management
- Analyze demand and address recurring causes of tickets
- Ensure effective use of Jira Service Management and the wider Atlassian toolset
- Establish effective service management for third-party suppliers, including clear SLAs, service reviews, escalation routes, and performance tracking
- Support supplier, contract, and licensing negotiations to secure value and appropriate terms
- Work with the Operations Director on dialler performance
- Oversee Azure, AWS, Microsoft 365, and physical data-center infrastructure
- Ensure services are reliable, secure, monitored, and appropriately supported
- Lead a review of cloud environments and recommend the future approach
- Hold operational responsibility for information security under the CTO’s accountability
- Maintain ISO 27001, ISO 9001, and Cyber Essentials Plus requirements
- Support UK GDPR compliance and contribute to FCA operational resilience
- Prepare the organization for likely PCI DSS requirements
- Provide weekly and monthly management information on the performance of IT
- Act as the senior out-of-hours escalation point for significant incidents and drive timely resolution
- Develop and deliver an IT improvement and technical resilience strategy
Requirements
- Experience leading IT operations, including service desk, infrastructure, and service management teams across multiple sites
- Proven ability to embed ITIL processes and develop managers and team leaders
- Experience overseeing Azure, AWS, and/or Microsoft 365 environments
- Strong supplier management skills, including performance improvement and commercial support
- Working knowledge of information security, data protection, and operational resilience
- Experience using service data and MI to drive root-cause analysis and continuous improvement
- Experience with in FCA-regulated financial services, debt purchase, collections, or another operationally regulated environment
