IT Operations & Security Lead - UK (Remote)

Overview

IT Operations & Security Lead

Location: Remote. Collaborating with teams in the USA, Canada and Europe.

Type: Full-time

Salary: Up to £90k. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but this is our general guardrail.

🌍 Our vision

Every child deserves a better start toward the best possible future. The right educator in the right classroom at the right time can change a child’s chances and, at scale, a nation’s trajectory. Yet too much of our education system’s time, money, and talent are lost to inefficiency.

At Zen Educate, we’re changing that through technology: helping schools save millions in tight times, helping educators find work that rewards their skills and fits their lives, and building a better-educated society that invests its best in every child.

What I’m looking for

👋 Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate, and I’m looking for someone to own Zen’s internal IT systems and security as we grow. You’ll report directly to me as part of our new Business Systems team, and you’ll be the first dedicated hire to replace what has so far been spread across several roles.

I’ll lean on you to execute well and to show the way on modern IT and security practice, including automation, governance and AI adoption. Your north star is a clear, proportionate, defensible and scalable IT and security posture, for the company Zen is today and the one it’s growing into.

That means fixing the problem in front of you, while making sure nobody has to fix it manually again tomorrow.

So this probably isn’t the role for you if you solely enjoy clearing ticket queues or becoming very good at provisioning accounts by hand.

It might be if your instinct is: why are we still doing this manually, and who do I need to work with to fix it?

My ideal hire:

has seen what great looks like and now wants to build their version of it from scratch;

takes this headspace off my plate, while keeping me informed and involved on the decisions that matter;

communicates confidently at every level of the business to get things done;

treats every pound spent here as a pound not spent elsewhere on our mission: investing confidently where it matters, cutting what doesn’t, and making the return easy to see.

Where we are and where we need to go

Zen now has around 600 people across the UK and US (not counting the educators we place in schools), and our IT and security practices need to grow with us.

Up to now, we’ve kept pace with that growth through good people, manual processes and a few well-kept spreadsheets. It’s worked well. But our growth has steepened recently (yay!), and the cracks and inefficiencies are starting to show.

More people have joined and more software has been bought. We found two company accounts for the same tool, one with a single admin who didn't know they were an admin. Permissions have multiplied and devices are spread across locations. When someone leaves, we work through a long list of accounts to deactivate, with the nagging feeling we’ve missed one.

None of these are particularly unusual on their own, and so far we’ve handled them case by case. But because the responsibility is spread across roles, nobody has the time to build the systems that would make these problems irrelevant, or even turn them into opportunities.

That’s what we want you to solve as we scale. We want an internal environment where:

our confidence in our posture is high, and justified;

people get the tools and access they need, quickly, with clear governance over what “need” means;

we’re secure by default, not because someone remembered;

“why do we have this?” and “is it still good value?” are easy to answer for any tool;

audits get more boring each year because the evidence already exists.

We want people at Zen to finish an IT or security request thinking “wow, that was easy”, and occasionally “I didn’t know we needed that, but I’m glad we have it”.

What the role looks like in practice

This is a new role at Zen, so part o