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

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.

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 individua