IT Operations Lead - Banking

Role overview Lead operational readiness for a major banking platform replacement that combines established financial infrastructure with agentic AI workloads. You will define how production readiness is demonstrated at regulatory gates and shape the operating model shared by the bank’s teams and external service providers.

Responsibilities - Establish service-level objectives, error budgets, and suitable behavioral quality measures for AI workloads, then secure service-owner adoption. - Set observability standards for critical services and AI workloads, including trajectory logging, alert ownership, and remediation of logging gaps. - Define runbook coverage, incident classification, intervention, rollback, and change-failure reporting practices. - Guide capacity planning through the parallel-run and cutover period; sponsor resilience exercises for payment systems and the core ledger, including inference capacity. - Own the reliability evidence in readiness reports, certificates, gate packs, and architecture decisions, reviewing and approving work produced by delivery teams. - Set responsibilities and operating standards across internal teams and managed providers, and guide the teams through the changes.

Requirements - 10 or more years leading IT operations, SRE, platform reliability, or infrastructure teams, including L1–L3 support and provider relationships. - Experience introducing service-level objectives and error budgets, and aligning operations goals with engineering and business stakeholders. - Deep infrastructure operations knowledge, including telemetry, redundancy, and backups. - Strong incident-management experience, including reviews that lead to system or organizational improvements. - Experience in regulated financial services or another setting requiring externally auditable operational evidence. - Ability to set standards for managed providers and lead delivery across complex programs with evolving ownership.

Nice to have - Operations experience with large language models or agentic systems, such as evaluation, drift detection, trajectory analysis, and model or prompt version control. - Exposure to core banking, payments, or scheme gateway integration.

Benefits and work setup Remote role with regular London attendance for workshops and regulatory gate weeks. This is a senior operational-readiness leadership role; it does not carry a client on-call rotation.