Head of IT, Dotdigital

• This is not a role for someone who has drifted from engineering into pure governance
• A genuine technical background: you have built things, broken them and fixed them again, and you are still comfortable in a shell or a console when it is called for
• Fluency with Microsoft 365, Azure, networking, and endpoint management across both Windows and macOS
• A demonstrated instinct for automation, and the habit of using it to eliminate manual work
• Senior leadership experience in Corporate IT, within a multi-site or international organisation, with a record of modernisation actually delivered
• The presence to lead a team, negotiate with vendors, and hold your own with senior leadership across the business
• Experience supporting a distributed international user base
• A substantial budget under your own management, and accountability for it

Desirable

• We are looking for an engineer who has become a leader. You will own our global Corporate IT estate - Microsoft 365, Azure, networking, telephony, identity and endpoints - and build and grow a team with strong engineering instincts
• We want someone with the authority to discuss strategy at a leadership meeting in the morning, and the technological credibility to help the team solve a problem with Intune in the afternoon
• Plenty works well, but some things only work because somebody remembers to do something manually on a Tuesday
• We need someone who instinctively knows which of those things to tackle first, and which are OK to continue living with. The service desk component is a major part of the team's work; but we have a long project list and not enough time to execute on it
• Take direct ownership of the Microsoft 365, networking and endpoint estate worldwide
• Recruit, mentor and retain a team of six across two continents, and raise its technical bar
• Set direction, and be able to defend it on the technical detail
• Replace manual processes with proper tooling: PowerShell, the Graph API, Intune, Slack automations, and more
• Treat Corporate IT with engineering discipline - version control, documentation, logging
• Make the call on whether ten lines of PowerShell is easier than buying a brand new software contract; and if so, help someone on the team to write those lines
• Software deployment discipline. A Mac user should not be asked for an administrator's password every time Slack updates itself
• A refresh of the audio-visual estate at the London office
• Asset management and lifecycle planning, treated as an engineering problem as much as an administrative one
• Direct a multi-million-pound budget: forecasting, cost control and supplier performance
• Negotiate with vendors, in close partnership with our procurement function
• Lead major projects — service transitions, tooling rollouts, disaster recovery — with the standing to be trusted on the technical detail and on the numbers alike
• Partner with InfoSec, which also reports to the CTO, on security posture and compliance
• Represent Corporate IT within the wider technology leadership, as a peer to our engineering leaders
• Make the department somewhere good people want to stay
• Build an IT function the rest of the business knows and respects
• A visible leadership role with real autonomy and a genuine mandate to change how things are done
• A seat in our technology leadership group, reporting directly to the CTO