Senior Director, Technology Operations

About Sycurio

Sycurio is a global leader delivering secure and seamless payment solutions that enhance customer experiences while ensuring compliance with industry standards like PCI DSS. Utilizing patented cloud-based technologies, Sycurio safeguards sensitive data across all customer touchpoints and channels to reduce fraud risk and build trust. Since its founding in 2009 (originally as Semafone), Sycurio supports organizations across 50+ countries on five continents, partnering with top global brands. The company is backed by major investor Livingbridge and continues to innovate secure payments technology.

Role Overview

This position consolidates accountability for all live client systems and operations under the "Run" function. Currently, platform, DevOps, support, and service delivery teams operate in silos; this role integrates them into a cohesive operation. The Senior Director owns service reliability, evolution, and cost-efficiency, transforming the approach from reactive ticket handling to proactive reliability engineering.

The role involves overseeing a complex, real-time voice and telephony infrastructure where Sycurio's patented DTMF-masking technology operates, alongside cloud and on-premises systems. While a dedicated telephony team provides hands-on expertise, this role offers technical leadership, setting architectural direction.

This is a hands-on leadership role where the incumbent will directly manage support, DevOps, and platform operations initially through outsourced partners, personally guiding technical decisions and progressively building internal leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end service health, including defining SLAs/SLOs and implementing mature incident, problem, and change management.
• Lead major incident response and act as senior escalation for live services, managing out-of-hours/on-call policies.
• Promote proactive reliability through root-cause analysis, observability improvements, and reducing downtime and change failures.
• Direct the evolution and roadmap of on-premises and cloud platforms as a product, including the voice/telephony infrastructure with its SBCs, SIP trunks, media processing, and carrier connections.
• Oversee rationalization and modernization of a diverse estate, guiding migrations ahead of end-of-life schedules.
• Establish automated patching and hardening practices with InfoSec collaboration, phasing out manual interventions.
• Shape the run-side DevOps function delivered by outsourced partners, improving CI/CD pipeline reliability, environment management, deployment, and observability. Evaluate insourcing opportunities over time.
• Manage the Support and SRE function directly during transition from reactive to proactive reliability, including eventual hiring of a Head of Support.
• Lead the operational relationship with outsourced engineering partners, managing SLAs, quality controls, capacity, and cost, while deciding insourcing timelines.
• Build and grow internal leadership and specialist teams in support, telephony, and DevOps aligned with growth and budget.
• Set engineering standards, operating rhythms, and career paths within the function.
• Be the principal liaison across Engineering (build to operations handoff), InfoSec (security), and commercial teams, integrating all components into a unified system.

Success Metrics in Year One

• Single ownership and roadmap for the running estate resulting in fewer incidents and rollbacks.
• Telephony infrastructure incorporated into standard reliability and security practices, with a specialist team established.
• Planned and progressing migration and rationalization of the legacy estate.
• Automated and regular patching and hardening replacing manual and reactive processes.
• Unified service functions working cohesively rather than in silos.
• Established build-to-operations readiness standards agreed across teams.
• Defined operating model for outsourced partner with clear decisions on insourcing.
• Stabilized run-side service delivery with clear interface to customer delivery management.
• Initial leadership hires commenced, starting with Head of Support role.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Senior leadership experience in technology operations, platform reliability engineering, or service delivery within SaaS or managed-service/MSP environments.
• Demonstrated management of real-time, availability-critical production estates (on-premises or hybrid) involving third-party providers such as carriers or networks.
• Technical and hands-on leadership abilities capable of making architectural decisions and directly running support and DevOps prior to building out teams.
• Understanding of real-time voice/session infrastructure sufficient to lead and hold voice specialist teams accountable.
• Experience managing outsourced/offshore delivery partners to SLAs and quality standards, with ability to determine insourcing needs.
• Strong incident, problem, and change management discipline (ITIL-informed and pragmatic) including major incident and on-call responsibility.
• Proven ability to break silos and collaborate cross-functionally across engineering, security, and commercial areas.

Desirable Skills and Background

• Hands-on experience with voice/telephony technologies including SBCs, SIP, media processing, and carrier interconnects.
• Familiarity with real-time, provider-dependent estates in related sectors like telco network operations, CPaaS, payment switching, low-latency trading, or live streaming.
• Exposure to regulated and security-sensitive domains such as payments, PCI DSS compliance, fintech, or contact-centre technology.
• Experience building or scaling internal teams from outsourced service baselines.

Additional Information

This is a hybrid position requiring presence at the Guildford office one day per week or as business needs dictate.

The recruitment process may incorporate artificial intelligence tools for application review and analysis to support hiring decisions made ultimately by humans. For inquiries about data processing in recruitment, contact the hiring team directly.