Head of IT

About Zyte

At Zyte, we eat data for breakfast, and you can eat your breakfast anywhere and work for Zyte. Founded in 2010, we are a globally distributed team of over 250 Zytans working from over 28 countries who are on a mission to enable our customers to extract the data they need to continue to innovate and grow their businesses. We believe that all businesses deserve a smooth pathway to data.

For more than a decade, Zyte has led the way in building powerful, easy-to-use tools to collect, format, and deliver web data quickly, dependably, and at scale. Today, the data we extract helps thousands of organizations make smarter business decisions, secure competitive advantage, and drive sustainable growth. Over 3,000 companies and 1 million developers rely on our tools and services to get the data they need from the web.

The Role

Zyte is looking for a Head of IT to lead our internal technology function into the AI era. This is emphatically not a helpdesk-manager role: at Zyte, internal IT is an engineering and enablement discipline. You will own the systems the whole company runs on: our business applications, the integrations and automation that connect them, our identity and security backbone, and, front and center, the internal AI tooling that is changing how every Zytan works.

You will lead two teams: IT Support, which keeps a globally distributed, remote-first workforce productive with a person-first service philosophy, and IT Tooling & Automation, an engineering pod that builds the integrations, internal services, and AI-driven workflows behind the scenes. You are a player-coach: comfortable setting a multi-year internal-platform strategy in the morning and reviewing an automation script or an AI workflow design in the afternoon.

AI is the heart of this role. Zyte builds AI-powered products, and we run our company the same way: AI coding assistants across engineering, AI workflows in operations, and a growing internal AI platform. You will own this landscape end to end - selecting and administering the tools, governing seats, usage and cost, hardening the guardrails, and partnering with our AI Enablement function so that adoption translates into real productivity, not shelfware. If a task at Zyte is manual, we want it automated; if it is automated, we want to know whether an agent should be doing it.

What You'll Do

Lead the IT organisation

· Own strategy, roadmap, budget and vendor landscape for all of internal IT: support, business applications, integrations, automation, and internal AI tooling.

· Lead, grow and develop the IT Support and IT Tooling & Automation teams; be the escalation point and the standard-setter for both.

· Run IT as a product for employees: measure the experience (SLIs/SLOs on the things that matter to Zytans), publish what you ship, and prioritise by business leverage.

Own the business application landscape

· Administer, integrate and continuously rationalise our business-critical SaaS systems: CRM and marketing (Salesforce, HubSpot), finance and billing, HR platforms, support platforms, and collaboration and engineering tools (Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, GitHub, Notion).

· Design reliable, API-driven workflows and data synchronization across platforms - one coherent, automated architecture instead of a pile of disconnected tools.

· Own vendor selection, consolidation, licensing and renewals with a clear cost-versus-value view.

Automate everything worth automating

· Champion a code-first automation culture: scripts, internal services, event-driven pipelines (APIs and webhooks), internal CLI tools and ChatOps - not just SaaS configuration.

· Build and evolve the internal 'IT Golden Path': automated onboarding and offboarding, identity and access provisioning, and self-service for the common 80% of IT requests.

· Set the technical bar for the IT Tooling & Automation pod and review its designs; contribute hands-on where it moves the needle.

Lead internal AI tooling and adoption

· Own the company's internal AI tool portfolio (AI coding assistants such as Claude Code and Copilot, chat and agent platforms, AI features inside our SaaS estate): evaluation, procurement, account and seat administration, usage and cost governance, and lifecycle.

· Ship AI into internal workflows: AI-powered support assistants, LLM-driven knowledge retrieval across internal documentation, automated ticket triage and resolution, and agentic automation of operational processes.

· Partner closely with the AI Enablement function and the AI champions network: IT provides the tools, access, guardrails and administration; enablement embeds them into each team's daily work.

· Define the sensible-use guardrails together with Security and Legal (data handling, model and vendor policies) so teams can move fast safely.

· Measure adoption and return: usage and cost analytics per tool and team, and a clear view of where AI actually saves time or removes work.

Run IT service management, security and compliance

· Deliver superior, person-first IT support to a global, remote workforce, with root-cause analysis rather than symptom-fixing.

· Own the employee identity and device backbone: SSO/SAML/SCIM provisioning, identity lifecycle automation, MDM (JumpCloud), password management and access audits under Zero Trust principles.

· Partner with Information Security to keep us continuously compliant (ISO 27001) and audit-ready, embedding compliance into automated processes instead of manual checklists.

What Success Looks Like

· Employees are unblocked fast and onboarding/offboarding runs itself: measurable service levels, near-zero manual provisioning.

· The business application landscape is consolidated, integrated and documented - data flows between systems without swivel-chair work.

· AI tools are genuinely adopted across the company with governed cost and measurable time savings - and Zyte is visibly ahead of the curve in how a company runs itself on AI.

· Manual internal work keeps disappearing: every quarter, processes that used to need a person are automated or agent-assisted.

· Audits pass without heroics, and security posture improves while friction goes down.

· The IT team grows in capability and reputation: an engineering team the rest of the company wants to work with.

You Are

A builder-leader

You have led IT, business systems or internal platform teams, and you still think like an engineer. You lead from the front, set a high technical bar, and are happiest when your team ships things that make work disappear.

AI-driven

You are genuinely excited about running a company on AI. You have rolled out AI tooling to real teams, you experiment constantly yourself, and you have a strong point of view on what works, what is hype, and how to govern usage and cost without killing adoption.

Automation-obsessed

Manual, repetitive work offends you. Your default answer to a recurring task is a script, a service, an integration or an agent - and you know when the pragmatic answer is a SaaS checkbox instead.

People-centric

You solve for the person, not just the machine. You communicate clearly with everyone from new joiners to the C-level, and you build a service culture your colleagues actually like dealing with.

Security-minded

You understand the 'why' behind security frameworks, MDM and Zero Trust, and you balance safety with organizational speed.

Commercially sharp

You treat the internal stack like a portfolio: you negotiate with vendors, consolidate overlapping tools, and can always say what something costs and what it returns.

Requirements

10+ years in IT engineering, business systems engineering or internal platform engineering at SaaS/tech companies, including 3+ years leading a team that owned internal business systems and automation.

· A hands-on engineering background you have kept alive: you can still read, review and (when needed) write automation code in Python or a comparable language, and you are fluent with APIs, webhooks, OAuth flows and integration frameworks.

· Proven ownership of a modern SaaS business application landscape (e.g. Salesforce or HubSpot, billing/finance systems, HR platforms, Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, GitHub, Notion) including cross-system integration and data synchronization at company scale.

· Demonstrated delivery of AI tooling into an organisation: LLM-based assistants, knowledge retrieval, AI-assisted support or agentic workflow automation - including the unglamorous parts (account administration, seat and usage governance, cost control, guardrails).

· Deep identity and security experience: SSO/SAML/SCIM, identity lifecycle automation, MDM (e.g. JumpCloud), Zero Trust access models.

· Experience supporting or passing security and compliance audits (ISO 27001, SOC2, GDPR).

· Vendor and budget management experience: selection, negotiation, consolidation and license management across a substantial SaaS portfolio.

· Experience serving a remote-first, globally distributed workforce with a person-first service philosophy.

· Excellent communication in English, across technical and non-technical audiences up to executive level.

Strong Nice-to-Haves

· Experience with agentic platforms and protocols (e.g. MCP), the Claude / Gemini Enterprise / OpenAI / Copilot ecosystems, or building internal agents on LLM APIs.

· FinOps-style governance of AI and cloud spend (usage analytics, per-seat economics, chargeback or showback).

· An SRE mindset applied to internal IT: SLIs/SLOs on the 'uptime' of the employee experience.

· Experience consolidating tool landscapes after growth or M&A.

It's not expected that any one candidate will bring deep expertise across every area. We are looking for someone who is especially strong in several of them, and excited to grow in the others.

Benefits

· Become part of a self-motivated, progressive, multicultural team.

· Have total flexibility: we are 100% remote, work from where you are most productive.

· Join an innovation culture: we encourage 'hacking' internal processes - if a task is manual, we want you to automate it.

· Work with a modern tool and AI stack, with the freedom and budget to shape it.

· Shape a strategic area of the business with high visibility and real impact.