Director Global IT (90-100%)
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
Open Systems is seeking a motivated and energetic leader to guide our internal IT organization-a strong, collaborative, and highly skilled global team that takes pride in enabling colleagues across EMEA, APAC, and NAM. Your engineering, operations, and service desk teams (~15 engineers) deliver the cloud/SaaS, on-prem, and end-user technologies that keep our people productive and our business moving. At Open Systems, we view IT as a force multiplier, not a cost center. We're looking for a leader with the vision, passion, and curiosity to champion new ways of working, help teams across the company unlock greater productivity, and push boldly for adoption of modern IT capabilities wherever they can have impact.
Your Mission
Own and evolve Open Systems' enterprise IT into a modern, cloud-first operating model. Translate business priorities into a focused roadmap, govern delivery across teams and partners, and raise the bar on reliability, security, and user experience - communicating progress and trade-offs clearly to executives and stakeholders.
- Set direction and outcomes. Align priorities with business value; hold teams accountable for measurable results. Going forward, define and lead an enterprise AI-first IT strategy and roadmap.
- Drive major transformations. Lead large-scale modernization programs (e.g., cloud migrations, datacenter exit strategies; Zero Trust posture improvements) while managing risk, dependencies, and executive communications.
- Raise operational excellence. Establish data-driven KPIs for availability, security, and service quality across global teams; ensure clear ownership and handovers from projects to operations.
- Elevate ITSM and service catalog maturity. Improve CMDB/service catalog accuracy, simplify the portfolio, and scale automation and self-service on the ITSM platform.
- Strengthen resilience. Ensure enterprise IT services are designed and operated with clear recovery objectives, tested continuity measures, and effective crisis response processes.
- Harden everything. Uphold and elevate security posture in collaboration with Security & Compliance executives; ensure defense in-depth and timely remediation of risks.
- Steward finances, partners, and suppliers. Own a CHF multi-million budget - planning, forecasting, and value realization; shape the buy/build/partner strategy and executive-level vendor governance.
- Develop leaders and teams. Build high-trust, high-accountability teams; coach line managers; grow talent; communicate crisply with executives and stakeholders.
Requirements
- Minimum 5 years' experience owning enterprise IT operations and engineering in a multi-region, cloud-first environment.
- Hands-on experience delivering large and complex IT engineering projects, demonstrating sound judgement on technical trade-offs.
- Proven success leading large migrations, platform modernizations, and IT mergers with visible outcomes and strong risk control.
- Depth in identity-centric architectures (e.g., Microsoft Entra ID/modern SSO) and pragmatic Zero Trust advancements.
- Applied governance of cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP) including FinOps and IAM best-practices.
- Demonstrated improvements to ITSM/CMDB quality and automation at scale (ServiceNow or equivalent).
- Audit-ready leadership across policy, change management, and BCM/DR
- Expertise with ISO/IEC 27001, ISAE 3402/SOC 1 Type II, and GDPR, translating control objectives into practical, auditable IT controls.
- Strong people and distributed team leadership; experience leading teams in North America and South Asia a plus.
- Fluency in English. Additional languages are an advantage.
- Switzerland work-ready (no sponsorship needed) and willing to relocate if needed for weekly on-site presence in Zürich.