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.