IT Service Lead

Who we are Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously. We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications. The role As Helsing's IT Support Lead, you will own the day-to-day delivery, performance, and experience of IT support across our European offices. You'll lead a distributed team of IT Support staff covering on-site, on-call, and triage responsibilities making sure every Helsing employee gets fast, high-quality help, and that every ticket makes our service better the next time around. You will be hands-on with Jira Service Management, fluent in using data to drive decisions, and an early adopter of AI agents and automation to scale the team's impact without scaling headcount linearly. You'll set the standard for what great internal IT feels like at Helsing for both the staff we support and the IT engineers doing the supporting directly enabling the engineers, AI specialists, and program managers building capabilities that protect our democracies. The day-to-day Own the daily operating rhythm of IT Support: ticket prioritization, queue health, SLAs, and ensuring the right issues are being worked on by the right people at the right time. Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of IT Support Engineers across the UK and Germany, including on-site staff, triage, and on-call rotations. Design and manage rotas; on-call, triage, and site coverage. Balancing fairness, coverage, and team wellbeing across multiple offices and time zones. Own ITʼs Jira Service Management as a product: queues, request types, workflows, automation rules, SLAs, forms, customer portals, and reporting. Define, maintain, and continuously improve escalation paths between L1/L2/L3 support, IT Engineering, Security, and external vendors including clear ownership, response expectations, and communication standards during major incidents. Build and own the IT Support performance reporting layer: dashboards, KPIs (CSAT, time-to-resolution, first-contact resolution, backlog age, escalation rates), trend analysis, and regular reporting to IT leadership and the wider business. Identify and deploy AI agents and automation (within Jira, M365, and our wider toolchain) to deflect repetitive tickets, accelerate triage, draft responses, and surface insights from ticket data. Continuously raise the bar on the end-user support experience. Clear comms, fast resolutions, great self-service, and a polished, consistent feel across every interaction. Equally raise the bar on the IT staff experience. Better tooling, clearer runbooks, sensible on-call load, meaningful career growth, and protection from avoidable toil. Partner with IT Engineering to turn recurring issues into permanent fixes and with Security to ensure support processes meet our compliance and audit obligations. Own and evolve our internal IT knowledge base, runbooks, and self-service content. You should apply if you Have 5+ years of experience in IT Support, including 2+ years leading or managing a support team in a fast-paced environment. Are highly proficient with Jira Service Management, comfortable designing workflows, automations, SLAs, queues, and reporting, not just using them. Have a strong, demonstrable track record of running support as a data-driven function, defining the right KPIs, building da