Head of IT

Head of IT (Onsite, London) - £100,000-£115,000

Company: Leading UK women's fashion retailer (high-growth)
Location: London, W12 (White City) - Onsite
Type: Permanent
Salary: £100k-£115k base (DOE)

The Role

We're looking for a Head of IT who can combine strategic leadership with hands-on technical authority. You'll shape and modernise the IT function while maintaining excellent service delivery for a fast-paced, multi-site retail environment. This role suits someone who has progressed from an engineering background and is still comfortable getting into the detail when needed.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team

• Lead, mentor and develop the IT team; build a culture of accountability and continuous improvement
• Implement structured performance reviews, development plans and certification roadmaps
• Recruit and retain high-performing technical talent; strengthen succession planning and resilience

Technical & Architecture (Hands-on)

• Own and evolve a hybrid estate (legacy on-prem + cloud) ensuring reliable integration
• Manage a mixed Mac + Windows endpoint environment (e.g., JAMF and Intune)
• Act as technical authority for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, identity/SSO (incl. Entra ID)
• Be the escalation point for complex incidents (network, servers, performance, security)
• Oversee patching, firewalling, DR replication and broader security/compliance controls

Business Delivery & Governance

• Scale the IT operating model to support a £250m+ retail business
• Move performance measurement beyond SLAs to business-impact KPIs/OKRs
• Set and enforce documentation/architecture standards; QA internal and vendor delivery
• Manage suppliers/SaaS partners and hardware vendors with strong operational governance

Service Delivery & Adoption

• Drive a customer-first IT service culture across HQ and stores
• Mature service desk from reactive to proactive; reduce downtime and improve user experience
• Lead rollouts/migrations via robust change management to avoid peak-trading disruption

Required Experience

• Senior IT leadership experience in a fast-paced, complex environment (ideally £250m+ turnover and/or multi-site)
• Clear engineering roots (Systems Admin / Network Engineer / Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure Architect)
• Retail/e-commerce and international operations exposure strongly preferred

Technical Skills (Hands-on expected)

• Hybrid cloud + virtualisation
• Identity & access: AD / Entra ID / Okta / Google Cloud Identity
• Endpoint management: Apple Business Manager, JAMF, Intune, GPOs
• Networking/security: routing/switching, firewalls, VPN, SD‑WAN, Wi‑Fi (retail footprint)
• Scripting/automation (PowerShell/Bash/Python) desirable

Key Competencies

• High technical credibility; strong vendor management/challenge
• Pragmatic problem-solving with commercial awareness
• Comfortable in ambiguity and competing priorities
• Able to translate technical detail into clear business outcomes

If you tell me which channel you mean (job board vs LinkedIn vs client portal), I can tailor the wording and length exactly to that format.

Please leave a thumbs up/down on this-if thumbs down, note what format you wanted and I'll rewrite it.