Director of Engineering; InfraOps

About IRISIRIS 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 (Infra Ops), you will lead a central function of approximately 45 engineers responsible for Federated Infra Ops, Core Infrastructure, Data stores, 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 Infra Ops 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 Infra Ops function, its structure, roles, service offering and ways of working.

Define and evolve the organisational structure across Federated Infra Ops, Core Infrastructure, Data stores and Support.

Establish clear service ownership, routing and escalation paths to remove ambiguity and single points of failure.

Define service boundaries and accountabilities between Infra Ops 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 Infra Ops 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 Git Hub Enterprise.

Cloud cost visibility, Fin Ops 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 Infra Ops function.

This includes:

Budget ownership…