Senior Director of IT & Automation - Appen

About the Role

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.

You will build and lead a high-performing team across IT support, enterprise technology and automation, hiring technically strong, proactive people who use AI to improve how they work and creating a culture of ownership, continuous improvement and practical problem-solving.

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.

What You'll Own

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

• Own IT's role in SOC 2 and ISO 27001, including controls, audit readiness, evidence and remediation.
• Maintain appropriate security, access and endpoint controls across the IT environment.
• Identify technology and operational risks before they become incidents.
• Establish practical governance for AI use across IT, balancing adoption with security, privacy and compliance.

AI & Automation

• Make AI and automation core tools for improving IT operations and employee experience.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate manual work and apply AI, automation, agents and self-service to areas such as help desk triage, onboarding, provisioning, IT administration and vendor management.
• Use tools such as Claude, Cowork, agents and AI-enabled workflows to build and improve solutions.
• Partner with Engineering and Product on larger automation initiatives.

Vendors & Commercial Management

• Manage Appen's technology vendor portfolio, including selection, negotiation, performance and renewals.
• Drive licence rationalisation, vendor consolidation and technology cost optimisation.
• Maintain clear visibility of technology spend and partner with Finance on investment decisions.

Team Leadership

• Build and develop a high-performing IT team across support, enterprise technology and automation.
• Create a culture where people solve problems rather than simply manage them.

What We're Looking For

• 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.

About Appen

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.