IT Business Partner – Engineering / R&D

We're looking for an IT Business Partner for Engineering/R&D who will be the single point of accountability between IT and the R&D organisation, owning the application roadmap and change-order budget for Jira and Confluence, and IT's operational role in system access and cybersecurity support for engineering systems.

The role turns IT from a shared-services back office into an embedded partner that ships what Engineering needs, funds it transparently, and is judged on business outcomes — not tickets closed.

Location & working model:

London, Hybrid (flexible)

Responsibilities:

• Own the Jira and Confluence roadmap supporting the R&D organisation — configuration, workflow, and integrations.
• Own system access management for R&D: provisioning, entitlement reviews, and the joiner/mover/leaver process for Jira, Confluence, and adjacent engineering tooling.
• Act as IT's operational partner to the CISO and the network/cloud team on cybersecurity controls touching engineering systems — access hygiene, audit findings, remediation tracking.
• Support legacy-environment ownership questions where R&D tooling is in scope, flagging gaps to the CISO.
• Manage the Engineering/R&D change-order budget and report spend and value delivered monthly.
• Shape solution direction for the business applications in scope, evaluating options and recommending configuration or platform approaches aligned to organizational standards.
• Govern the intake and prioritization of business change requests, assessing business value, feasibility, and risk before committing them to the delivery queue.
• Own the quality and traceability of requirements documentation, validating business acceptance before changes are released into production.

Requirements:

• 8+ years in IT business-partnering, systems ownership, or platform product management, ideally in a PE-owned or high-growth software company.
• Comfortable owning a budget and a change-order backlog — this is a P&L-adjacent, strategic role.
• Data-literate, with a track record of driving accountability for data quality across business stakeholders.
• Direct communicator, comfortable in exec and leadership rooms, able to say no and hold a boundary.
• Direct, hands-on Jira and Confluence administration experience at scale.
• Working knowledge of access management and security-audit processes, and demonstrated comfort partnering closely with a CISO function.
• Proven track record working for a Born-in-the-Cloud or Cloud-Native technology company — must have.