Head of IT

About the Role

What You Will Own

• End-to-end ownership of enterprise IT: Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online, Azure AD / Entra ID, endpoint management (Intune, Autopilot), and device lifecycle across all locations
• Active Directory strategy across merged environments post-acquisition — domain consolidation, GPO harmonization, identity federation, and decommissioning of legacy systems
• Establish and enforce Firm-wide standards for OS, security tooling, encryption, patch management, and software compliance
• Oversee IT helpdesk and support operations; define SLAs and escalation paths; mature the ITSM function

• Architect and govern Cognida's multi-cloud footprint across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Own cloud cost management and FinOps discipline: rightsizing, commitment strategies (reserved instances, CUDs, savings plans), showback/chargeback models, and spend anomaly detection
• Define cloud governance frameworks: landing zones, tagging taxonomies, IAM policies, network segmentation, and policy-as-code guardrails
• Drive infrastructure reliability, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning across cloud environments

• Govern Cognida's consumption of AI APIs and services — tracking spend across LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others), implementing cost allocation by team or project, setting organizational usage policies, and identifying waste
• Own the token economy: establish budgeting, monitoring, and alerting frameworks so AI API costs remain predictable and accountable as usage scales across the business
• Manage vendor relationships with AI platform and tooling providers — evaluating commercial terms, SLAs, and fit as the market evolves rapidly
• Serve as the operational bridge between the engineering teams consuming AI services and the finance/leadership teams who need visibility into that spend — you don't need to architect the AI systems, but you need to ensure they run efficiently and within budget

• Own and evolve Cognida's AI-assisted development environment: tool selection, access governance, and usage policy for platforms such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or equivalent
• Ensure developers have fast, consistent, and secure environments — standardized dev containers, remote development infrastructure, and self-serve provisioning
• Drive adoption of AI coding tools strategically, measuring productivity impact and managing associated licensing and token costs
• Maintain security guardrails around code generation tooling: data exfiltration controls, secrets scanning, and IP protection policies

• Partner with engineering leads to mature CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent), and GitOps workflows
• Own the infrastructure side of the software delivery lifecycle: build and release infrastructure, artifact registries, environment provisioning, and secrets management
• Drive observability standards: centralized logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across both product and internal IT systems
• Champion SRE principles for internal platforms — error budgets, runbooks, and blameless post-mortems

• Define and own the security posture across the full stack — endpoint, identity, and cloud
• Ensure compliance readiness (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or client-mandated frameworks) and maintain audit trails across all infrastructure
• Lead vulnerability management, penetration testing coordination, and incident response for infrastructure-related events
• Establish data governance and access control policies for AI-related workloads — particularly around prompt logging, API key management, and output storage

• Manage and lead a small but high-performing IT and infrastructure team
• Own the IT and infrastructure budget: capital planning, vendor negotiations, contract renewals, and ROI reporting to leadership
• Be a strategic advisor to the executive team on technology decisions that have infrastructure or operational implications
• Develop and maintain the IT roadmap aligned to Cognida's business and product strategy — 12-month operational plan and 3-year strategic horizon

Who You Are

• 14–18 years of progressive technology infrastructure experience, with at least 5 years in a Director, Head of IT, or equivalent leadership role
• Proven track record managing multi-cloud environments (GCP, Azure, and/or AWS) at an organizational scale, including cost governance and cloud architecture
• Comfortable operating in an AI-first company — familiar with how teams consume LLM APIs, the cost dynamics of AI tooling, and the governance challenges that come with it; deep AI/ML engineering expertise is not expected
• Experience leading IT through a merger or acquisition — integrating environments, rationalizing tooling, and managing the people side of change
• Background in or strong exposure to DevOps and platform engineering practices; comfortable working alongside senior engineering teams as a peer

• Multi-cloud architecture and governance (GCP, Azure, AWS) — including FinOps, IAM, networking, and landing zone design
• Microsoft 365 ecosystem (Exchange Online, Azure AD / Entra ID, Intune, Defender)
• AI API cost management and token economy tooling (LLM gateway proxies, usage dashboards, provider billing APIs)
• Infrastructure-as-code: Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent; GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux
• Observability stack: Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent
• Security: SIEM, CASB, zero-trust network access, endpoint detection & response
• Developer tooling: GitHub/GitLab, AI coding assistants, remote dev environments, container runtimes

• Able to translate business goals into infrastructure strategy and communicate it clearly to both technical teams and the C-suite
• Strong vendor management skills — able to negotiate commercial terms and hold vendors accountable to SLAs
• Financially literate: comfortable owning a budget, building business cases, and reporting on unit economics of cloud and AI spend
• Empathetic people leader who can attract strong talent, build team culture, and navigate the complexity of a post-acquisition environment

Certifications (Preferred)

• Google Professional Cloud Architect or AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
• Certified FinOps Practitioner (FinOps Foundation)
• CISSP, CISM, or equivalent security leadership certification
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional or Strategic Leader