Senior Director, Business Platforms - IT & Business Platforms

<p><strong>Locations</strong>: London | Lisbon</p><p class="job-description-header">Who We Are</p><p>Boston Consulting Group partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. BCG was the pioneer in business strategy when it was founded in 1963. Today, we help clients with total transformation-inspiring complex change, enabling organizations to grow, building competitive advantage, and driving bottom-line impact.<br><br>To succeed, organizations must blend digital and human capabilities. Our diverse, global teams bring deep industry and functional expertise and a range of perspectives to spark change. BCG delivers solutions through leading-edge management consulting along with technology and design, corporate and digital ventures—and business purpose. We work in a uniquely collaborative model across the firm and throughout all levels of the client organization, generating results that allow our clients to thrive.</p><br><br><p class="job-description-header">What You'll Do</p><p>BCG runs on a portfolio of enterprise business platforms that power how the firm operates day to day. ServiceNow is the largest and most critical of these platforms, and sits alongside a wider landscape of other business platforms supporting different parts of the firm. As BCG scales, and as AI reshapes what these platforms can do, we need a single technical owner who can optimise this ecosystem reliably today while building it into a modern, AI-ready foundation for tomorrow.</p><p>Realising this vision requires leadership that combines deep platform engineering and operations expertise with commercial judgment, security rigor, and the ability to partner closely with the business functions these platforms serve.</p><p> </p><p>As Senior Director, Business Platforms, you will be BCG's foremost technical authority on the firm's enterprise business platform ecosystem. Anchored by ServiceNow, our largest platform, and extending to others distributed across BCG, you will own how these platforms are run, secured, funded, and evolved, acting as the connective tissue between business stakeholders and the technical teams who build and operate the platforms.</p><p> </p><p>You will lead with both breadth - spanning platform operations, financial and vendor management, security and compliance, workflow design, and business partnership - and depth, setting the technical direction and standards the wider platform ecosystem is built on.</p><p>You will oversee key decisions, including platform and vendor selection, consolidation versus fragmentation across the portfolio, investment priorities, and the technology, security, and operational health metrics used to track platform performance, while providing clarity and direction where ownership or approach is not already well defined.</p><p> </p><p>From a people-management perspective, you will lead the technical teams who build, operate, and support BCG's business platforms, including the function providing 24/7 support and manage the vendor relationships that sit alongside them. You will own a multi-million dollar budget across the portfolio.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Own and operate BCG's business platform portfolio</strong></p><p> </p><ul><li>Operate and run BCG's business platforms on behalf of the firm, with ServiceNow as the largest and most critical example, alongside the other business platforms distributed across BCG.</li><li>Own end-to-end platform operations, including maintenance, patching, feature upgrades, and release and change management, to keep platforms reliable, current, and performant.</li><li>Lead the 24/7 support model delivered through your teams, acting as the senior escalation point for outages and major incidents, and driving post-incident review and continuous improvement.</li><li>Partner with CMDB and asset management teams to maintain an accurate, well-governed technical inventory across the platform landscape.</li><li>Understand the full ecosystem of platforms and their use cases, and reconcile or consolidate capabilities to deliver the best value and experience for BCG and its people. </li></ul><p><strong>Provide financial and vendor stewardship</strong></p><ul><li>Own a multi-million dollar budget across the business platform portfolio, forecasting spend and optimising total cost of ownership.</li><li>Manage vendor relationships end to end, including contract negotiation, renewals, licensing, and performance against SLAs.</li><li>Evaluate new products, platforms, and vendors with a long-term, scalable view, bringing visionary, forward-thinking judgment to where BCG should invest next.</li></ul><p><strong>Safeguard security, compliance, and data</strong></p><ul><li>Ensure BCG's business platforms meet the firm's security and compliance standards, protecting some of BCG's most trusted and sensitive data.</li><li>Partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams on data privacy, confidentiality, and jurisdictional requirements across the platform portfolio.</li><li>Own the platforms' security posture, including access controls, vulnerability management, and adherence to relevant regulatory frameworks.</li></ul><p><strong>Partner with the business</strong></p><ul><li>Work closely with business stakeholders to understand their needs and ensure the features and capabilities they rely on are supported and continuously improved.</li><li>Design, build, and refine technical workflows inside the platforms, and review and analyse capabilities to ensure they deliver real business value.</li><li>Partner with operational teams, business teams, HR, Legal, and other functions whose work runs through these platforms, ensuring the ecosystem works cohesively across the firm.</li></ul><p><strong>Lead people and build capability</strong></p><ul><li>Lead, mentor, and grow the technical teams responsible for engineering, administration, and operations across the business platform portfolio.</li><li>Build a high-performing, globally capable support function able to deliver 24/7 coverage.</li><li>Step in where gaps exist between teams, vendors, or platforms to ensure continuity, ownership, and progress.</li></ul><p><strong>Shape the future of BCG's platform ecosystem</strong></p><ul><li>Bring visionary, forward-thinking judgment to continuously evaluate emerging products, platforms, and technologies relevant to BCG's business and service operations.</li><li>Build towards a modern, AI-ready business platform ecosystem (for example, applying agentic AI and intelligent automation within ServiceNow and other platforms) keeping BCG at the leading edge of service delivery and ITSM practice.</li><li>Drive adoption and enablement of new features and capabilities across the business, ensuring stakeholders get full value from the platforms they depend on.</li></ul><p> </p><br><br><p class="job-description-header">What You'll Bring</p><ul><li>12+ years of senior technical leadership experience operating enterprise business platforms, ideally including ServiceNow, within a complex, matrixed organisation.</li><li>Proven experience owning platform budgets at multi-million dollar scale, including vendor contract negotiation and license and cost optimisation.</li><li>Deep, hands-on knowledge of ServiceNow (or a comparable enterprise platform), including architecture, workflow design, configuration governance, and release management.</li><li>Experience leading 24/7 technical support operations, including incident management, escalation, and post-incident review practices.</li><li>A strong track record on security and compliance for enterprise platforms handling sensitive data (e.g. data privacy, confidentiality, and relevant regulatory frameworks).</li><li>Experience building and leading technical teams (engineers, platform administrators, and architects) and managing external vendors and system integrators.</li><li>A demonstrated ability to set a forward-looking technology vision, including applying agentic AI and automation to enterprise platforms.</li><li>ITIL certification, or equivalent operational framework experience; relevant ServiceNow certifications are a plus.</li><li>Familiarity with agile methodologies and ways of working, with the ability to run technical workflows efficiently within a platform environment.</li></ul><br><br><p class="job-description-header">Who You'll Work With</p><p>Chief Technology Officer (direct line manager). </p><p>Business stakeholders across BCG functions that rely on business platforms. </p><p>Platform, Product and asset management teams. </p><p>Operational teams, HR, Legal, and other corporate functions. </p><p>Security, Risk, and Compliance teams. </p><p>External vendors and technology partners.</p><br><br><p class="job-description-header">Additional info</p><p>At BCG, our people and relationships are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that in-person collaboration plays an important role in our culture, mentorship, and professional development.</p><p><br>For this role, you will generally be expected to work from a BCG office or in person with clients on a regular basis (typically around 50% of working time), depending on business needs and in line with local policies and practices.</p><p> </p><p>We aim to provide a dynamic and collaborative environment that fosters connection and teamwork.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>YOU'RE GOOD AT:</strong></p><ul><li>Running and modernising enterprise business platforms such as ServiceNow at scale, balancing day-to-day reliability with longer-term innovation.</li><li>Translating business needs into platform capabilities, technical workflows, and a coherent roadmap.</li><li>Making sound trade-offs across security, cost, speed, and user experience in complex technology environments.</li><li>Leading 24/7 technical operations, including incident response and escalation management.</li><li>Managing vendor relationships and multi-million dollar technology budgets.</li><li>Evaluating emerging platforms and technologies, including agentic AI, and separating genuine value from hype.</li><li>Building, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams.</li><li>Communicating clearly and credibly with both technical teams and senior business stakeholders.</li><li>Partnering cross-functionally with CMDB and asset management, operations, HR, and Legal to keep platforms aligned with the business they serve.</li></ul><p> </p><p> </p><br><br><p>Boston Consulting Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity / expression, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under national, provincial, or local law, where applicable, and those with criminal histories will be considered in a manner consistent with applicable state and local laws. <br>BCG is an E - Verify Employer. <a href="https://careers.bcg.com/global/en/e-verify" target="_blank">Click here </a> for more information on E-Verify.</p>