Director of Technology

The Director of Technology is responsible for overseeing the organisation’s IT infrastructure and for leading its transformation into an AI-native, increasingly autonomous estate, one that is self-monitoring, self-healing, predictive, and AI-optimised, while ensuring high availability, security, scalability, and operational excellence. This role sets and executes the roadmap from today’s hybrid and cloud operations toward AI-managed infrastructure, embedding AI and agentic automation across operations, decision-making, and service delivery. The candidate is an AI-driven leader who will architect and build this target state, drive strategic initiatives, implement best practices, and continuously raise operational efficiency in alignment with business objectives.

o Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise IT infrastructure, including data centers, networks, cloud platforms, and end-user services.

o Ensure infrastructure scalability, security, and compliance with industry standards and business needs.

o Manage on-premise, hybrid, and cloud environments (Azure).

o Re-architect the estate toward AI-native design principles — telemetry-rich, API-driven, and automation-first — so that infrastructure is observable and actionable by AI systems.

o Define and deliver the multi-year roadmap to an AI-native / AI-managed estate, with clear phases, success metrics, and adoption milestones.

o Implement AIOps for predictive and preventive maintenance, anomaly detection, and intelligent event correlation across the estate.

o Drive self-healing and auto-remediation of routine incidents, reducing manual intervention and mean-time-to-resolve.

o Deploy agentic automation for routine operational workflows (provisioning, patching, scaling, capacity, cost optimisation).

o Build the data and observability foundation (telemetry, logging, metrics) required for AI/ML to operate reliably on the estate.

o Establish human-in-the-loop thresholds and guardrails that keep autonomous operations safe, auditable, and reversible.

o Lead 24x7 IT operations to ensure high availability, performance, and resilience of enterprise systems.

o Define and implement IT service management (ITSM) best practices (ITIL framework).

o Ensure incident, problem, and change management processes are in place to minimise downtime and enhance service quality.

o Embed AI-driven service management — predictive incident prevention, AI-assisted triage, and intelligent routing — into ITSM processes.

o Work closely with the Director of Cybersecurity and security teams to enforce robust security policies and compliance measures.

o Ensure adherence to industry regulations and frameworks (ISO 27001, NIST, GDPR, etc.).

o Implement disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) strategies.

o Leverage AI-augmented security and threat detection for the infrastructure estate, in partnership with Cybersecurity.

o Drive cloud migration, optimisation, and automation strategies.

o Implement modernisation initiatives such as software-defined networking (SDN), hybrid cloud adoption, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

o Advance modernisation beyond IaC toward AI-optimised, policy-driven, and increasingly autonomous infrastructure (self-tuning capacity, cost, and performance).

o Establish governance for AI/agents that operate the estate: reliability standards, guardrails, escalation thresholds, and human oversight.

o Ensure responsible-AI and audit readiness for autonomous operations — traceability, accountability, and compliance with emerging AI regulation.

o Manage relationships with technology vendors, service providers, and partners.

o Oversee IT budgets, ensuring cost optimisation and value-driven investments.

o Evaluate and select AI/AIOps platforms and partners; build the business case and track ROI of AI-driven operations.

o Lead and mentor a multi-functional IT team, fostering innovation and continuous improvement.

o Develop a high-performance culture, ensuring teams are equipped with the latest skills and technologies.

o Lead the change-management and upskilling required to move the team to AI-augmented ways of working; cultivate AI fluency across the function.

o Partner with business leaders to align IT infrastructure and operations with strategic objectives.

o Provide executive leadership with regular reports on IT performance, risks, and technology roadmaps.

o Communicate the AI-native infrastructure vision, roadmap, and value realisation to executive leadership and stakeholders.

o Work closely with Executive Director - IT, security, digital transformation, and business leaders.

o Collaborate with IT teams on cross-functional projects and operational improvements.

o Engage with technology vendors, consultants, and managed service providers.

o Ensure contractual obligations and SLAs are met.

o Strong experience in enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud computing, virtualisation, networking, and cybersecurity.

o Hands-on expertise in Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and cloud platforms (Azure).

o Knowledge of automation, DevOps, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

o Demonstrated experience adopting AIOps / agentic operations and applying AI/ML and LLM-driven tooling to infrastructure and operations.

o Ability to architect AI-native infrastructure — observability, automation, and the data foundations autonomous operations depend on.

o Deep understanding of ITSM frameworks (ITIL), disaster recovery, and high-availability systems.

o Strong knowledge of cybersecurity best practices, compliance, and risk management.

o Familiarity with AI governance, responsible-AI, and guardrails for autonomous operations.

o Proven experience leading large, geo-distributed IT teams.

o Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to align IT capabilities with business goals.

o Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

o Track record of leading AI-driven transformation and organisational change — taking a team from traditional to AI-augmented operations.

o An AI-first mindset: defaults to AI/automation to solve problems and raise the bar on efficiency.