What You'll Own

1. BAU IT Operations (keeping the business running)

You'll manage the operational running of IT across Multiverse — ensuring our 1,000+ employees get excellent support, that people join, move within, and leave the business with seamless and secure experiences, and that incidents are handled swiftly and professionally. This is delivered by your in-house team, so you'll own resourcing, workload, and standards directly rather than through a third party.

2. IT Systems Implementation (building what gets us to IPO)

You'll lead the planning and delivery of the systems and platform changes IT needs to make as we scale — new tooling, integrations, identity and endpoint platform upgrades, automation of manual processes, and the technical controls (access management, audit trails, change management) that a business preparing for IPO is expected to have in place. You'll run these as real projects: scoped, resourced, tested, and rolled out with minimal disruption to BAU.

Leading the function

You'll lead the whole of IT — a small, fully in-house team spanning both remits — balancing workload and investment across BAU and project work, and making the call on trade-offs between "fix it now" and "fix it properly." You'll own the IT budget and roadmap, and be the one accountable when the exec team or board asks how IT is scaling with the business. A big part of the role is making things better across both sides of the house: spotting manual processes that should be automated, building workflows that save time, and continuously improving how IT operates as the business scales. You're not just keeping the lights on — you're making the whole operation more efficient, more auditable, and more scalable.

Your Impact (First 6–12 Months)

• Stabilise and prove BAU: Quickly own service delivery end-to-end, with SLAs met and your in-house team's standards and workload clearly managed and visible. Once that’s done, you move on to implementing a culture of continuous improvement, which gives measurable improvements in all areas of our BAU work.
• Ship your first systems project and define the roadmap: Take at least one meaningful systems implementation (identity, ITSM, automation platform, or major integration) from scope to live rollout, with documentation and controls a future auditor could follow. And at the same time develop a clear roadmap of future projects that allows IT Ops to enable and power the Business for the future rather than provide drag.
• Build the team model: Establish how your team's time splits across BAU and project work, and how it's protected for continuous improvement work rather than constantly firefighting. Identify any skills gaps and hire or restructure as appropriate.
• Lead with AI, not just tolerate it: Set a visible standard for using AI and automation as the default way of working across the team — identifying manual, repeatable processes across the IT Ops estate to eliminate, and freeing capacity for higher-value systems work. But you won’t stop there, as you’ll go on to use it where the thinking is hard, not just where the task is easy — diagnosing complex incidents, forecasting capacity and risk, and shaping how the estate evolves.
• Raise the operating bar: Introduce (or tighten) the documentation, change management, and incident processes that scale with headcount and hold up under IPO-level scrutiny.
• Build a customer focus: Build real relationships with the stakeholders IT Ops serves — understanding their goals well enough to anticipate needs, not just respond to requests. You'll be judged not on tickets closed but on whether other leaders see IT Ops as a team that makes their work easier.

What You'll Bring

Essential

• 7+ years in IT operations or IT leadership, including 3+ years as the most senior IT person in a business or leading multiple IT teams/functions at once
• Proven experience owning IT strategy and service delivery in a scaling organisation with a fully in-house team, including managing to SLAs and internal standards
• Experience selecting, procuring, and managing software/tooling vendor relationships (contracts, budget, renewals) even without an MSP in the mix
• Track record of leading systems or platform implementations end-to-end — scoping, stakeholder management, testing, rollout, and adoption — as well as running BAU in parallel
• Strong automation mindset — you've built or directed workflows and automated processes that saved real, measurable time across a function, using scripting (Python/Bash) or platforms like n8n, Zapier, or Workato
• Genuinely AI-native as a leader: you use AI tools daily, you can tell the difference between a real agentic workflow and a chatbot wrapper, and you set the tone for your team to work the same way
• You see automation and AI as the engine that lets a lean team punch above its weight — not a side initiative, but core to how you plan headcount, prioritise work, and deliver strategic outcomes for the business
• Solid technical foundation: identity management (Okta, Entra ID, or JumpCloud), endpoint management, SaaS administration (Google Workspace or equivalent), and how these connect to broader systems architecture and IT strategy
• Comfortable owning trade-offs between "run the business" and "change the business" investment, and making that case to the exec team
• Excellent communication — calm under pressure, credible with end-users, vendors, auditors, and senior leadership alike
• Process-minded with a bias for documentation, change control, and continuous improvement
• Full ownership experience: budget management, vendor/tooling negotiation, and direct people leadership

Highly Desirable

• Experience in tech, edtech, or high-growth environments, ideally having led IT through a significant scaling milestone (funding round, M&A, or IPO readiness)
• Direct exposure to IPO or public-company readiness work: SOX, ITGCs, access reviews,