IT Operations & Security Lead - UK (Remote)

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 of the job is defining what it looks like. These are the problems we already know you’ll be working on.

🔑 Identity and access

We still grant access to several systems by hand when someone joins. You could improve the checklist. We’d rather you built the workflow that makes the checklist disappear.

You’ll own internal identity and access: Google Workspace, SSO, MFA, groups, permissions and "least privilege" as a principle. Access should follow people as they join, move and leave, not depend on someone remembering to remove it.

🧹 SaaS sprawl

We use a lot of software. Some of it is essential. Some probably isn’t. Some have 80 licences and 37 active users.

You’ll build the definitive view of our software and service estate (what we use, who owns it, who has access, what it costs, when it renews) and work with teams and vendors to improve how we buy, renew and retire tools.

🛡️ Security that works

Policies are useful. Policies people understand and follow are far more useful.

You’ll define and maintain our IT and security policies, then turn them into working processes, technical controls and training that sticks: access reviews, vulnerability management, external testing, incident processes and an easy way to report concerns.

📋 Trust, assurance and compliance

Customers increasingly want evidence that we take security seriously. You’ll make that evidence easy to provide: security questionnaires, audit evidence, Cyber Essentials and future certifications, risk management and governance. Certifications should follow real controls, not stand in for them.

Rather than answering every questionnaire from scratch, you’ll build a reusable, increasingly self-service trust process. Where security meets privacy, you’ll work closely with our Legal and Data Protection advisors.

💻 The device fleet

Devices need to be secure, patched, encrypted and accounted for wherever people work, and not all of them are company-owned. You’ll set a proportionate approach to personal devices alongside endpoint management for our own fleet. Our People Team handles ordering and delivery; you’ll make sure every device is set up and provisioned securely, remotely, through to retirement.

When a critical vulnerability lands, we want to know which devices are affected, what needs to happen, and that it actually happened within our 14-day patching window.

🚨 When something goes wrong

Things will go wrong. A vendor has an incident. A device falls out of compliance. Someone finds access that shouldn’t exist.

Your job isn’t to guarantee nothing happens. It’s to make sure we respond well: clear ownership, good communication, recorded decisions, and the underlying issue actually fixed. We already have an established incident process for our product; you’ll extend it to everything else.

What this role doesn’t own

It covers corporate IT and security, not the platform we build as our product.

• Product and platform security sits with our Foundations Lead and Engineering. You’ll coordinate with them on company-wide initiatives such as least privilege, and may drive them as overall lead.

• The wider employee lifecycle sits with our People Team. You’ll own th