Director of IT & Automation - Appen

Role overview

Senior leadership role owning the IT function of a modern, AI-native organization. The position combines technical depth, operational judgement, and people leadership, partnering with executive leadership to align technology, risk, service, and investment priorities across the business.

Responsibilities

- Set the IT roadmap spanning enterprise technology, support, security, and automation, while leading endpoint management and major incident response. - Provide technical leadership across Microsoft 365 (administration, identity, access, security) and broader enterprise platforms including Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian, AWS, Databricks, and AI tooling. - Own the IT contribution to SOC 2 and ISO 27001, including controls, audit readiness, evidence collection, remediation, and identification of risks before they become incidents. - Apply AI, automation, agents, and self-service to areas such as help desk triage, onboarding, provisioning, IT administration, and vendor management. - Oversee the technology vendor portfolio, including selection, negotiation, performance management, renewals, licence rationalisation, and cost optimisation in partnership with Finance. - Build and develop a high-performing IT team across support, enterprise technology, and automation, fostering ownership and continuous improvement.

Requirements

- 8+ years in IT, including significant leadership experience. - Proven background leading IT support and service delivery in a fast-paced technology, software, or services environment. - Hands-on knowledge of Microsoft 365 and enterprise IT administration, with credibility across SaaS, cloud infrastructure, endpoints, identity, and integrations. - Experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and IT security governance. - Commercial acumen in vendor management, negotiation, and technology spend. - A track record of turning AI and automation into working solutions for real IT problems, with examples of automated, redesigned, or eliminated processes. - Executive presence and the ability to operate with ambiguity.

Nice to have

- Deep AWS experience and cloud cost management. - Hands-on administration of Salesforce, Workday, or Atlassian. - Familiarity with Databricks or AI platform tooling. - DevOps or SRE exposure.