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Celonis is seeking a Head of IT Platform & Infrastructure to lead one of the core teams within its Global IT organization. This role reports to the Head of IT Infrastructure and owns the platforms that power daily operations across the company—Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and a curated portfolio of business-critical SaaS applications—alongside a deliberately lean, fully cloud-based infrastructure with no legacy data center.
You will lead a distributed team of platform engineers across Europe and India, working closely with IT Identity & Endpoint, IT 1st Level Support, and InfoSec teams. This is a hands-on leadership position where you are close enough to the technology to earn your team's trust while senior enough to set direction, own the budget, and make strategic decisions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading, coaching, and growing a distributed team of platform engineers; building a genuine ownership culture with clear responsibilities and no single points of knowledge
- Defining and owning the roadmap for SaaS platforms, AI enablement, and supporting infrastructure; aligning with IT strategy and business priorities
- Acting as the accountable service owner for core SaaS platforms (Google Workspace, Slack, and others), covering availability, change management, admin standards, and documentation
- Taking full ownership of the Atlassian Cloud platform (Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence): administration, governance, performance, and configuration standards at enterprise scale
- Using AI actively to transform how the team works—automating operational routines, ticket and incident triage, provisioning, reporting, and documentation rather than scaling headcount
- Driving platform governance: tenant configuration, admin roles, data retention, external sharing, and third-party app/integration approvals
- Simplifying and right-sizing the application landscape; consolidating overlapping tooling and retiring obsolete systems
- Owning data protection for SaaS platforms, including enterprise backup and recovery rollout and operation
- Maintaining the reliability and security of lean cloud infrastructure and core services (DNS, certificates)
- Owning the integration layer between platforms: APIs, event-driven workflows, and automated provisioning
- Working in close alignment with InfoSec; embedding least privilege, hardened baselines, and useful logging into platform design; owning remediation of findings and providing reliable audit evidence
- Owning the budget and vendor/partner relationships for platforms in scope
- Acting as a credible internal advocate for responsible, secure AI adoption
Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience in IT platform operations, SaaS administration, platform engineering, or IT infrastructure, including at least 4 years of people leadership
- Proven track record of leading distributed teams across locations and time zones, ideally in a fast-growing SaaS or technology company
- Deep hands-on experience administering and governing enterprise SaaS platforms at scale, ideally Google Workspace and Slack
- Strong Atlassian Cloud expertise: administration, governance, and configuration of Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence at enterprise scale
- Demonstrated AI fluency: hands-on experience applying LLMs and AI tooling to real operational problems; solid understanding of how AI gateways and model access are deployed, secured, and governed
- Hands-on know-how in hosting and operating MCP servers and providing virtualized infrastructure for custom builds, with focus on standardized, repeatable deployments
- Practical experience automating platform work through APIs, integrations, workflow automation, and scripting
- Good understanding of identity and access management concepts (SSO, SAML/OIDC, SCIM provisioning, privileged access)
- Solid working knowledge of public cloud services and SaaS data protection and backup concepts
- Strong IT security fundamentals and track record of working effectively with security and audit teams (e.g., ISO 27001 environments)
- Experience with ITSM practices, service ownership, budget responsibility, and vendor management
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership
- Builder's mindset, comfort with ambiguity and change, pragmatism to deliver in small, low-risk steps
- Fluent English; German is a plus but not required
