• 27/08/26
• London, City of London
• £130k - 135k per year
• Permanent
• Senior IT Appointments
• Full time

Head of IT

£135,000 + discretionary bonus + benefits | Hybrid (3 days/week, Central London) | Permanent

The Opportunity

Our client is an established, well-funded specialist lender in the property finance space, with an ambitious growth plan and a stable, experienced leadership team.

Having grown steadily since launch without ever having a dedicated technology function, the business has reached the point where it needs its first permanent Head of IT - a genuinely greenfield opportunity to build a function from the ground up.

This is a rare chance to shape technology strategy and team structure from scratch inside a growing business with real backing and no legacy baggage to unwind.

The Role

Reporting directly to the COO, you'll take ownership of technology across a business that runs on an entirely outsourced, SaaS-based model - there is no in-house development team, and this is fundamentally a leadership, governance and vendor-management role rather than a hands-on engineering one.

Your priorities from day one will include:

• Bringing structure and governance to an in-flight core system upgrade that currently lacks dedicated internal oversight
• Building proper supplier and vendor management discipline across a third-party technology estate
• Establishing the operational foundations - service desk, ticketing, access management - needed to support a business planning significant headcount growth
• Owning and evolving an existing IT strategy, building out a small permanent team over time, including delivery, infrastructure and support roles
• Supporting the technology implications of new product lines as the business expands beyond its current lending niches
• Providing oversight of cyber security and data governance, working with specialist third-party providers

About You

• Strong generalist IT leadership experience, spanning infrastructure, applications and supplier/vendor management - this is not a role for a narrow specialist
• Experience in financial services, ideally mortgage or specialist lending, is a strong advantage
• A track record operating in a small, outsourced-technology environment rather than running a large in-house department - candidates from big, heavily-resourced enterprise IT functions are unlikely to find this the right fit
• Comfortable in an SME/scale-up environment: hands-on, pragmatic, and used to working directly with vendors rather than through layers of internal process
• Genuinely motivated to build and grow with a business over the medium term, rather than seeking a short-term step

The Package

• Base salary up to £135,000, with some flexibility for an exceptional candidate
• Discretionary annual bonus (the business has paid a bonus every year since inception)
• 8% employer pension contribution
• 30 days holiday
• Director-level benefits structure
• Hybrid working: 3 days per week in the Central London office

To find out more or apply on a confidential basis, please get in touch.