Director of Engineering (InfraOps)

Director of Engineering (InfraOps)

About IRIS

IRIS Software Group is one of the UK's largest privately held software companies, trusted by 100,000+ businesses, schools and accountancy firms to keep their operations running. Our software pays 1 in 6 UK employees, supports over 12,000 schools, and is relied on by 91 of the top 100 UK accountancy firms.

We're a Great Place to Work certified employer, recognised for our commitment to well-being, inclusion and development - and we're growing fast.

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

• 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

• 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.

• Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Impact: Your work will influence millions globally.

• Growth: Continuous learning and career development opportunities.

• Belonging: A culture that celebrates diversity and empowers every individual.