Director of Engineering (InfraOps)
IRIS · Iris, United Kingdom · hybrid
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.
- Belongin