Head of IT Operations

**Head of IT Operations**

**Prodigy Finance - who are we?**

Prodigy Finance is a platform that delivers socially responsible financial services; making it possible for students from more than 130 countries to fulfill their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools by financing their international postgraduate studies. Our purpose is to democratise access to lifechanging education, whilst delivering competitive financial and social returns to alumni, institutional and private investors.

Our borderless and innovative model enables education loan financing to students from across the globe, whilst using predicted post-degree affordability rather than present-day salary in assessing creditworthiness. Since 2007, Prodigy Finance has extended over US$1.4 billion through the platform to fund over 28,000 students.

We are funded by some of the most highly regarded and pre-eminent financial institutions in the world, including Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and more recently the US DFC and CPPIB

**What will you do in the role?**

You will be managing our team of IT support engineers as well as our security function. The IT team provides base infrastructure support for internal teams and IT support for staff in various countries around the world, ensuring standards along with SLAs are adhered to throughout. The security function is responsible for creating and maintaining information security policies and procedures, selecting and implementing new information security technologies, security governance and monitoring, and creating information security training programs.

**What are some of the responsibilities of this role?**

Provide technical leadership and direction
- Manage our relationships with third party IT vendors, including contract negotiation
- Continually review capability and cost of the IT function against budget
- Facilitate disaster recovery and BCP planning and mock test activities for all global offices
- Support escalations for all offices globally
- Drive Information Security governance and management
- Create and manage security and data protection strategies

Manage, mentor and grow the IT and security teams
- Support the team through coaching and mentoring
- Hire additional IT support and/or security staff as and when required
- Grow and support our learning culture

Translate operational challenges into technical solutions
- Understand end-to-end operations and ensure greater efficiency through better use of technology
- Improve user experience through adoption of technology best practices and service enhancements
- Passionate: about technology and how it enables the delivery of an amazing, convenient customer journey with commercial return.
- Technical competence; have deployed and managed cloud-based IT systems which enable seamless remote working. Experience facilitating Information Security audits
- Biased to focused action: Getting the right things done at the right time with an absolutely proven ability to do so
- People leadership: A proven manager and an experienced leader with great communication and interpersonal skills, who can challenge and motivate the team to achieve outstanding results.
- Strong project management and organization skills
- Demonstrated ability to build consensus among many stakeholders

**Qualifications and experience**
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
- Previous experience in a senior IT position responsible for support helpdesk, infrastructure and networks
- Previous experience in a senior IT position overseeing Information Security governance and management, and creating and managing security strategies
- Previous experience in Financial Service Industry or FinTech (preferably growth phase organizations)
- Excellent communication skills and a strong teamwork ethic
- Ability to manage multiple work streams, deliver on commitments, and work effectively
- Strong experience in designing and executing technical processes
- Proven technical background with a strong understanding of IT infrastructure architecture
- Strong operations experience: truly understands operational challenges and converts that into technology solutions
- Ability to take on and assimilate new ideas, assess the technology landscape and identify useful solutions
- Strong team management, communication, organisational, and follow-up skills
- Experience with administering a corporate Google Workspace, Zoom, Slack and other similar enterprise platforms
- Strong understanding of networking principles
- Familiarity with managing Active Directory
- Experience with achieving and maintaining security and compliance standards across all IT solutions