Senior Director, Technology Operations

About Sycurio:
Sycurio is a global leader in secure, frictionless payment solutions that empower enterprises to enhance customer experience and simplify compliance. Its patented cloud-based technologies protect sensitive data across all customer interactions and channels, ensuring compliance with industry standards like PCI DSS while reducing fraud risk and strengthening trust. Founded in 2009 as Semafone, Sycurio supports organizations in over 50 countries across five continents, partnering with leading brands worldwide. Backed by major investor Livingbridge, Sycurio continues to pioneer solutions that make payments secure and seamless.

We are creating a single, accountable owner for everything Sycurio has deployed and running at a client, internally known as the "Run" function. Today the functions that keep our live service healthy (platform, DevOps, support, and service delivery) operate as separate silos, each touching the customer without a cohesive view. This role brings them together. You own the reliability, evolution, and cost-efficiency of the running estate, you break those silos down, and you lead the shift from a reactive, ticket-driven operation to a proactive, reliability-led one.

Critically, that estate includes the real-time voice and telephony infrastructure on which Sycurio's patented DTMF-masking technology sits, alongside the cloud and on-prem systems around it. Keeping that infrastructure secure, available, and evolving is at the core of this role. A telephony lead and specialist team sit within your function and hold the hands-on voice expertise; you provide the technical leadership across the voice estate, owning its direction and architectural decisions.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a purely managerial one. At the outset there is no Head of Support and no internal DevOps lead beneath you: Support is delivered today through our outsourced engineering partner, and DevOps is currently run entirely by that partner. You will personally set direction and make the technical calls across support, DevOps, and the estate from day one, and build the leadership beneath you over time.

You will own the run-side relationship with our outsourced engineering partner, and you will be the named operational interface between Engineering (build), InfoSec (security), and our commercial teams.

You will lead a function composed of internal staff (SRE, Service Delivery, and a telephony specialist team) plus the ops-side of our outsourced engineering partner.

Owned functions

(several led by you directly at the outset, with leadership hires to follow):

• Support and SRE (on-call): owned directly at first and delivered today via the outsourced partner; a Head of Support to be hired as the function matures
• Platform and telephony engineering: the on-prem and cloud estate and the voice infrastructure (SBC, SIP, media, carrier interconnects), with a telephony lead and specialist team holding the hands-on work
• DevOps and developer experience (run side): CI/CD reliability, environments, deployment, and observability; currently delivered by the outsourced partner, to be shaped and, over time, selectively insourced
• Run-side Service Delivery, including telephony provisioning and change
• Run-side management of the outsourced engineering partner
  
  
  
  
  

Key Responsibilities

Service ownership and reliability

• Be the single accountable owner for the health of the live client service; define and hold SLAs/SLOs and a mature incident, problem, and change-management practice
• Own major-incident response and the out-of-hours/on-call model for the live service, acting as the senior escalation point
• Replace firefighting with proactive reliability: root-cause discipline, observability, and measurable reductions in downtime and change-failure rate
  
  
  
  

Platform, telephony, and estate

• Own the evolution of the on-prem and cloud estate against a quarterly roadmap; treat the platform as a product with a single accountable owner
• Own the real-time voice/telephony infrastructure (SBCs, SIP trunks, media processing, carrier interconnects) as a first-class part of that estate, held to the same reliability, security, and roadmap discipline, with the telephony lead and specialists owning the hands-on engineering
• Lead the rationalisation and modernisation of a large, heterogeneous estate (many VMs and numerous bespoke deployments) and deliver its migration ahead of end-of-life deadlines

Desirable

• Hands-on background with voice/telephony infrastructure: SBCs, SIP, media processing, and carrier interconnects
• Experience running a comparably real-time, provider-dependent estate in an adjacent domain: carrier / telco network operations, CPaaS (voice and messaging), payment or transaction switching, low-latency trading / market-data, or live streaming / broadcast
• Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments (payments, PCI DSS, fintech, contact-centre technology)
• Experience building or insourcing a function from an outsourced baseline
  
  
  
  
  

Additional Information
This will be a Hybrid role with a requirement to attend our Guildford office 1 day per week and based on business need.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.