IT Manager

Purpose of the Role Reporting directly to the Head of IT, the IT Manager will oversee, evolve, and secure our core corporate IT infrastructure, platforms, and support services. Operating within a highly regulated fintech and payments environment, you will step beyond day to day firefighting to provide strategic technical leadership, architectural oversight, and rigorous vendor governance. This is a hybrid leadership and hands on role. You will manage a distributed, remote first infrastructure footprint spanning Europe and South Africa, directly leading a remote Infrastructure Operations Engineer in South Africa with an eye toward future team expansion in Malta. You will balance long term modernization with operational excellence, ensuring our internal systems are scalable, compliant, and highly resilient. Key Responsibilities Strategic Leadership & Infrastructure Governance Technical Direction: Own the internal IT infrastructure architecture, roadmap planning, and modernization strategies to align with company growth. Team Leadership & Scaling: Manage, mentor, and develop the Infrastructure Operations Engineer. Establish KPIs, manage performance, and design the operational structure for future team expansion. Risk & Security Posture: Act as the ultimate technical authority for internal IT security hardening, access controls, patch management, and critical risk mitigation approvals. Vendor & Cost Optimization: Drive vendor strategy, negotiate service contracts, and optimize infrastructure spend across tooling, licensing, and data centre footprints. Core Infrastructure & Data Centre Operations Data Centre Ownership: Supervise and maintain our physical and virtual footprint at the Malta Data Centre, including server room hardware upkeep, UPS monitoring, and physical access controls. Fintech Applications Management: Oversee the administration, upkeep, and compliance monitoring of mission critical financial frameworks including CESOP, SWIFT, SEPA and BOL. Virtualization & Systems: Administer and optimize core HyperVisors, Active Directory/Domain structures, and overall server health. Network & Security Fabric: Maintain advanced network configurations, firewalls, corporate VPN services, and physical integrations (CCTV, Alarm systems, and HikCentral Access Control). Operational Momentum & Availability Incident Ownership: Serve as the final escalation point and incident commander for critical internal IT and infrastructure service disruptions. Business Continuity: Design, test, and implement robust High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), and backup strategies using tools like Acronis. Monitoring & Visibility: Oversee the comprehensive active monitoring framework (Checkmk) tracking certificate expirations, server metrics, network health, and automated alerts. Process Automation: Partner with your report to eliminate operational bottlenecks by automating routine workflows via Jira, scripts, and internal tooling. Compliance & Cross-Functional Engagement Regulatory Remediation: Drive regular infrastructure audits and lead technical execution for PCI-DSS remediations and Security/Risk assessment requests. Cross Border Collaboration: Seamlessly manage internal IT services (onboardings, offboardings, hardware lifecycle management via Snipe-IT) across a remote European and South African workforce. Requirements Experience & Qualifications Industry Expertise: 6 to 8+ years of experience in IT Systems Administration and Infrastructure, with at least 2+ years in a Team Lead or Managerial capacity - ideally within Payments, FinTech, or highly regulated financial spaces. Technical Breadth: Proven experience managing data centre hardware, virtualization technologies (HyperVisors), corporate networking (Firewalls, VPNs), and cloud spaces (AWS administration). Fintech Literacy: Previous exposure to or hands on management of highly secure processing environments or financial message environments (SWIFT, SEPA, regulatory reporting ecosystems). Location & Presence: Must be based in Malta to manage physical infrastructure at the Malta Data Centre and handle periodic office hardware/server setups, while excelling in a remote first team culture. Skills & Attributes Strategic Thinker, Practical Doer: Equal capability to design a 3 year modernization roadmap and dive into complex multi system troubleshooting alongside your engineer. Operational Rigor: Deep commitment to eliminating single points of failure through standard operating procedures, clean runbooks, and thorough documentation. Communication & Collaboration: Ability to translate complex infrastructure dependencies and security risks into clear business metrics for the Head of IT and cross functional stakeholders. Nice to Have / Advantage Advanced Compliance: Prior experience directly facilitating technical evidence gathering for audits. Project Management: Proven experience utilizing Agile frameworks Jira/Confluence to track infrastructure projects and lifecycle migrations.