Director of Technology Operations
We are building the next operating model for a ~150-person technology organization behind production-critical financial infrastructure.
We are looking for a Director of Technology Operations to lead that transformation.
This is not a traditional infrastructure or IT operations role. The mandate is to evolve Technology Operations from a primarily reactive model toward a scalable organization built around clear ownership, platform engineering, automation, self-service, operational excellence, resilience and measurable outcomes.
You will initially lead several established technology functions through their existing Heads and Leads, with approximately 25 people across Platform/DevOps, Corporate IT and Operational Excellence. The mandate is broader than the initial team size: you will help shape the operating model of a ~150-person technology organization and build capabilities designed to scale significantly beyond today's structure.
Your responsibility will go beyond managing these teams. You will help shape how the broader technology organization operates: how production services are owned, how incidents and changes are managed, how engineers consume infrastructure capabilities, how operational risks are identified, and how recurring manual work is systematically eliminated.
A major part of the role is organizational transformation. We expect you to assess the current model, challenge it where necessary, define the target state, develop the leaders underneath you, and deliver measurable improvements rather than simply introduce new processes.
The goal is straightforward: as the company grows, Technology Operations should become more reliable, resilient and scalable while requiring less manual coordination, less operational toil and less executive intervention.
What you will do
- Lead the transformation of Technology Operations across Platform/DevOps, Corporate IT and Operational Excellence, moving the organization from reactive operations toward ownership, automation, self-service and measurable outcomes.
- Define the Technology Operations strategy, target operating model, organizational structure, responsibilities, priorities and transformation roadmap.
- Lead multiple established technology functions through Heads, Leads and other managers, creating clear accountability and developing leaders who can operate with increasing autonomy.
- Lead the evolution of DevOps toward a Platform Engineering model that reduces operational toil, increases self-service and improves developer productivity while maintaining reliability and security.
- Partner with Engineering to establish a "you build it, you own it" model, where product teams retain ownership of their services in production while Technology Operations provides the platform, standards, tooling and operational framework that enable them to operate reliably.
- Develop Service Management toward Operational Excellence: strengthen service ownership, incident and problem management, introduce risk-based change governance, reduce unnecessary manual controls, and use operational data to eliminate systemic causes of failures.
- Transform Corporate IT toward a secure, automated employee technology model, with strong identity and access lifecycle management, device management, governance and employee self-service.
- Continuously assess the current organization, technology landscape and operating model, identify structural and operational gaps, and turn them into concrete improvement initiatives.
- Improve the maturity, reliability, scalability and efficiency of technology operations supporting production-critical systems.
- Define meaningful operational metrics and use them to identify systemic problems, measure transformation outcomes and drive improvements rather than simply report performance.
- Own the Technology Operations contribution to digital operational resilience, including ICT business continuity, disaster recovery, backup and restoration, resilience testing, recovery objectives, crisis readiness, and remediation of findings from incidents and resilience exercises.
- Partner with Security, Risk and Compliance to maintain an effective ICT risk management and control environment, including technology risk identification, critical service dependencies, ICT third-party risk, resilience testing, audit readiness and regulatory remediation.
- Ensure operational and technology risks are identified early, understood, prioritized and addressed appropriately.
- Support the company through audits, certifications, regulatory requirements and other controls relevant to financial and technology organizations.
- Own and optimize budgets, technology vendors, infrastructure investments and external partnerships within the function.
- Partner closely with Engineering, Security, Risk, Compliance, Product, Finance and other business functions.
- Represent Technology Operations in cross-functional and executive discussions and communicate complex technology and operational topics clearly to different audiences.
- Help prepare the technology organization for the next stage of the company's growth, including increasingly complex enterprise customers, new products and a larger engineering organization.
What we are looking for
- Significant leadership experience in Technology Operations, IT Operations, Infrastructure & Operations, Platform/Production Operations, Platform Engineering or a comparable technology function.
- Experience as a manager of managers, with responsibility for several teams or functions through Heads, Engineering Managers, Team Leads or equivalent leadership roles.
- Previous experience as a Technology Director, VP/Head of Technology Operations, Platform/Infrastructure leader or in a comparable senior role within a product engineering organization is highly relevant.
- Proven examples of significant organizational or technology transformation: changing operating models, building or restructuring functions, introducing new capabilities, increasing operational maturity, scaling teams or materially changing how technology organizations operate.
- Experience leading or evolving DevOps, SRE or infrastructure capabilities toward Platform Engineering, including developer self-service, automation and reduction of operational toil.
- Strong understanding of modern production ownership models and the relationship between Platform Engineering and product engineering teams.
- Experience with production-critical systems where availability, reliability, security and operational failures have direct business impact.
- Experience with IT and Service Management in modern product/engineering environments, including incident, problem and change management.
- Experience transforming Corporate IT or employee technology environments, including identity/access lifecycle, endpoint/device management, automation, governance and employee self-service.
- Practical experience with business continuity, disaster recovery and operational resilience in production-critical environments, including BIA, RTO/RPO, backup and restoration, resilience testing and remediation.
- Experience working with Security, Risk and Compliance teams and managing technology and operational risks.
- Exposure to audits, certifications, regulatory requirements and operational controls relevant to financial institutions or other regulated environments.
- Working knowledge of regulatory frameworks relevant to technology operations in financial services, such as DORA, and the ability to translate regulatory requirements into pragmatic engineering and operational controls, is a plus.
- Experience managing budgets, vendors, contracts and technology investments.
- Ability to operate effectively when requirements, organizational boundaries or the final solution are not yet fully defined.
- Track record of developing leaders and building teams that can operate without constant escalation or executive intervention.
- Ability to move between strategic topics and operational problems: understand what requires executive attention, delegate what should be owned by your leaders, and personally step in when the situation requires it.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, including the ability to work effectively with technical teams, senior business stakeholders and executive leadership.
Experience in fintech, payments, banking, financial infrastructure or another regulated and production-critical technology environment would be highly valuable.
How we think about this role
We are not looking for a traditional IT or infrastructure leader whose primary focus is maintaining existing systems and following established processes.
We need someone who is comfortable entering an environment where not everything has already been defined — and who sees that ambiguity as part of the mandate.
You should be able to understand how the organization actually operates today, distinguish symptoms from systemic problems, bring the right people together, make decisions with incomplete information, and turn those decisions into measurable organizational and technology improvements.
You will not be expected to solve every problem personally. A major part of your role will be to build strong Heads and Leads who can own their areas independently, while you focus on the most important organizational, strategic and cross-functional challenges.
At the same time, limited resources, legacy approaches or imperfect processes should be constraints to work with — not reasons why progress cannot happen.
What success looks like
Within the first 6–12 months, we expect to see measurable movement in addition to plans:
- reduced recurring operational toil;
- increasing developer and employee self-service;
- stronger and clearer service ownership;
- fewer repeated incidents and systemic operational failures;
- more risk-based and automated change management;
- improved developer and employee experience;
- clearer operational and resilience metrics;
- measurable progress toward a Platform Engineering model;
- stronger operational resilience and risk management;
- and Heads and Leads operating with greater autonomy.
You will have established a clear target operating model and transformation roadmap, but success will not be measured by the existence of the roadmap itself. It will be visible in how the organization operates.
Success means the organization requires less manual coordination and executive intervention while becoming more reliable, resilient, faster and more scalable.
