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/2