Head of IT Platform & Infrastructure

The Team:

The Head of IT Platform & Infrastructure leads one of the core teams of our Global IT organization and reports to the Head of IT Infrastructure. The team owns the platforms almost every Celonaut works in every day — Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and a long tail of business-critical SaaS applications — as well as a deliberately lean, fully cloud-based infrastructure with no legacy data center to maintain.

You lead a distributed team of platform engineers across Europe and India and work side by side with our IT Identity & Endpoint and IT 1st Level Support teams and in very close alignment with InfoSec. Security and identity are shared design principles here, not downstream review steps.

The Role:

This role owns the strategy, operation, and evolution of Celonis' internal platform landscape. You set the direction for how our collaboration and productivity platforms are run, governed, and simplified, and you make sure they stay reliable, secure, and easy to use for a fast-moving global company. You take full ownership of our Atlassian Cloud estate and run it to the same standard as any other production platform.

We are explicitly looking for a leader with a strong AI skillset and mindset: someone who treats AI as a core engineering capability, uses it to remove manual toil from platform operations, and can explain both its value and its risks credibly to leadership. This is a hands-on leadership role. You are close enough to the technology to earn your team's trust and senior enough to set direction, own the budget, and say no.

The work you’ll do:

• Lead, coach, and grow a distributed team of platform engineers; hire, develop careers, and build a genuine ownership culture with clear responsibilities per platform and no single points of knowledge
• Define and own the roadmap for our SaaS platforms, AI enablement, and supporting infrastructure; align it with the IT strategy and business priorities and communicate trade-offs clearly to leadership
• Act as the accountable service owner for our core SaaS platforms — Google Workspace, Slack, and further business-critical applications — covering availability, change and release management, admin standards, and documentation
• Take full ownership of our Atlassian Cloud platform (Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence): administration, governance, performance, and configuration standards that scale as usage across the company grows
• Use AI actively to change how the team works — automating operational routine, ticket and incident triage, provisioning, reporting, and documentation instead of scaling headcount
• Drive platform governance: tenant configuration, admin roles, data retention, external sharing, and the approval of third-party apps and integrations
• Simplify and right-size our application landscape; consolidate overlapping tooling and retire what is no longer needed
• Own data protection for our SaaS platforms, including the rollout and operation of enterprise backup and recovery
• Keep our lean cloud infrastructure and core services such as DNS and certificates reliable and secure
• Own the integration layer between platforms: APIs, event-driven workflows, and automated provisioning, together with the IT Identity & Endpoint team
• Work in close, continuous alignment with InfoSec; embed least privilege, hardened baselines, and useful logging into platform design, own remediation of findings, and provide reliable audit evidence
• Own the budget and the vendor and partner relationships for the platforms in your scope
• Act as a credible internal advocate for responsible, secure AI adoption — enabling teams rather than gatekeeping them

The qualifications you need:

• 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, and a 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 in providing virtualized infrastructure for custom builds, with a focus on standardized, repeatable deployments
• Practical experience automating platform work through APIs, integrations, workflow automation, and scripting; the specific languages and tools matter less than the instinct to automate
• Good understanding of identity and access management concepts such as SSO, SAML/OIDC, SCIM provisioning, and privileged access
• Solid working knowledge of public cloud services and of SaaS data protection and backup concepts
• Strong IT security fundamentals and a track record of working effectively with security and audit teams, for example in 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
• A builder's mindset, comfort with ambiguity and change, and the pragmatism to deliver in small, low-risk steps
• Fluent English; German is a plus but not a requirement