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…