Appen 2 Director of IT & Automation at Appen leads IT function and shapes operations in an AI-native company. Responsible for IT leadership, enterprise technology, security, AI & automation, vendor management, and team leadership.
Responsibilities
Appen is looking for a Director of IT & Automation to lead our IT function and help shape how a modern, AI-native company operates.
This is a senior leadership role combining technical depth, operational judgement and people leadership. You will work closely with the CPTO and senior leaders across the business to align technology, risk, service and investment priorities.
We want someone who sees AI as a genuine lever for changing how IT operates, not simply another tool to add to the stack. You should be comfortable moving between strategy and execution, getting into the technical detail when a problem requires it.
IT Leadership & Operations
Set the IT roadmap across enterprise technology, support, security and automation.
Lead IT support, endpoint management and major incident response.
Shape the IT operating model and team as Appen grows.
Enterprise Technology
Own the health, configuration and integration of Appen's core enterprise technology environment.
Provide technical leadership across Microsoft 365, including administration, identity, access and security.
Oversee our broader enterprise technology environment, including Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian, AWS, Databricks and Anthropic, ensuring platforms are well integrated, governed and fit for purpose.
Security & Governance
Qualification
8+ years in ITProven experience leading ITAble to diagnose problemsExperience with SOC 2ProactiveParticularly valuable
Required
8+ years in IT, including significant leadership experience.
Proven experience leading IT, including IT support and service delivery, in a fast-paced technology, software or services environment.
Hands-on knowledge of Microsoft 365 and enterprise IT administration.
Technical credibility across enterprise SaaS, cloud infrastructure, endpoints, identity and integrations.
Able to diagnose problems, challenge technical decisions and understand how systems actually work.
Experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and IT security governance.
Commercial acumen across vendor management, negotiation and technology spend.
A demonstrated track record of turning AI and automation into working solutions for real IT problems, with examples of processes you have automated, redesigned or eliminated.
Executive presence and the ability to build credibility with senior leaders, technical teams and vendors.
Proactive, resourceful and comfortable operating with ambiguity.
Particularly valuable: Deep AWS experience, cloud cost management, experience administering Salesforce, Workday or Atlassian, familiarity with Databricks or Anthropic, and DevOps/SRE exposure.
Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre-training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.
