Head of IT

About Cognida.ai

Our Purpose is to boost your competitive advantage using AI and Analytics.

We Deliver tangible business impact with data-driven insights powered by AI. Drive revenue growth, increase profitability and improve operational efficiencies.

We Are technologists with keen business acumen - Forever curious, always on the front lines of technological advancements. Applying our latest learnings, and tools to solve your everyday business challenges.

We Believe the power of AI should not be the exclusive preserve of the few. Every business, regardless of its size or sector deserves the opportunity to harness the power of AI to make better decisions and drive business value.

We See a world where our AI and Analytics solutions democratise decision intelligence for all businesses. With Cognida.ai, our motto is No enterprise left behind.

Head of IT

Location: Hyderabad (with global remit)

About The Role

Cognida.ai is building at the frontier of applied AI and we need our internal technology infrastructure to match that ambition. This is a Director-level role with full strategic and operational ownership of Cognida's entire IT landscape: from enterprise systems and cloud platforms to AI developer tooling, token economics, and DevOps practices.

This is not a support role. You will set the technology strategy, own the architecture decisions, build and lead the team, and be a senior voice in how Cognida scales. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business leadership, and you will be expected to think as much about what we should build as what we need to run.

What You Will Own

Enterprise IT & Identity

• End-to-end ownership of enterprise IT: Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online, Azure AD / Entra ID, endpoint management (Intune, Autopilot), and device lifecycle across all locations
• Active Directory strategy across merged environments post-acquisition — domain consolidation, GPO harmonization, identity federation, and decommissioning of legacy systems
• Establish and enforce Firm-wide standards for OS, security tooling, encryption, patch management, and software compliance
• Oversee IT helpdesk and support operations; define SLAs and escalation paths; mature the ITSM function
  
  

Multi-Cloud Platform Management

• Architect and govern Cognida's multi-cloud footprint across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Own cloud cost management and FinOps discipline: rightsizing, commitment strategies (reserved instances, CUDs, savings plans), showback/chargeback models, and spend anomaly detection
• Define cloud governance frameworks: landing zones, tagging taxonomies, IAM policies, network segmentation, and policy-as-code guardrails
• Drive infrastructure reliability, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning across cloud environments
  
  

AI Tooling & Token Economics

• Govern Cognida's consumption of AI APIs and services — tracking spend across LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others), implementing cost allocation by team or project, setting organizational usage policies, and identifying waste
• Own the token economy: establish budgeting, monitoring, and alerting frameworks so AI API costs remain predictable and accountable as usage scales across the business
• Manage vendor relationships with AI platform and tooling providers — evaluating commercial terms, SLAs, and fit as the market evolves rapidly
• Serve as the operational bridge between the engineering teams consuming AI services and the finance/leadership teams who need visibility into that spend — you don't need to architect the AI systems, but you need to ensure they run efficiently and within budget
  
  

AI Coding & Developer Environment

• Own and evolve Cognida's AI-assisted development environment: tool selection, access governance, and usage policy for platforms such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or equivalent
• Ensure developers have fast, consistent, and secure environments — standardized dev containers, remote development infrastructure, and self-serve provisioning
• Drive adoption of AI coding tools strategically, measuring productivity impact and managing associated licensing and token costs
• Maintain security guardrails around code generation tooling: data exfiltration controls, secrets scanning, and IP protection policies
  
  

DevOps & Platform Engineering (Collaboration)

• Partner with engineering leads to mature CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent), and GitOps workflows
• Own the infrastructure side of the software delivery lifecycle: build and release infrastructure, artifact registries, environment provisioning, and secrets management
• Drive observability standards: centralized logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across both product and internal IT systems
• Champion SRE principles for internal platforms — error budgets, runbooks, and blameless post-mortems
  
  

Security, Compliance & Risk

• Define and own the security posture across the full stack — endpoint, identity, and cloud
• Ensure compliance readiness (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or client-mandated frameworks) and maintain audit trails across all infrastructure
• Lead vulnerability management, penetration testing coordination, and incident response for infrastructure-related events
• Establish data governance and access control policies for AI-related workloads — particularly around prompt logging, API key management, and output storage
  
  

Leadership & Strategy

• Manage and lead a small but high-performing IT and infrastructure team
• Own the IT and infrastructure budget: capital planning, vendor negotiations, contract renewals, and ROI reporting to leadership
• Be a strategic advisor to the executive team on technology decisions that have infrastructure or operational implications
• Develop and maintain the IT roadmap aligned to Cognida's business and product strategy — 12-month operational plan and 3-year strategic horizon
  
  

Who You Are

Experience

• 14–18 years of progressive technology infrastructure experience, with at least 5 years in a Director, Head of IT, or equivalent leadership role
• Proven track record managing multi-cloud environments (GCP, Azure, and/or AWS) at an organizational scale, including cost governance and cloud architecture
• Comfortable operating in an AI-first company — familiar with how teams consume LLM APIs, the cost dynamics of AI tooling, and the governance challenges that come with it; deep AI/ML engineering expertise is not expected
• Experience leading IT through a merger or acquisition — integrating environments, rationalizing tooling, and managing the people side of change
• Background in or strong exposure to DevOps and platform engineering practices; comfortable working alongside senior engineering teams as a peer
  
  

Technical Breadth

• Multi-cloud architecture and governance (GCP, Azure, AWS) — including FinOps, IAM, networking, and landing zone design
• Microsoft 365 ecosystem (Exchange Online, Azure AD / Entra ID, Intune, Defender)
• AI API cost management and token economy tooling (LLM gateway proxies, usage dashboards, provider billing APIs)
• Infrastructure-as-code: Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent; GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux
• Observability stack: Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent
• Security: SIEM, CASB, zero-trust network access, endpoint detection & response
• Developer tooling: GitHub/GitLab, AI coding assistants, remote dev environments, container runtimes
  
  

Leadership & Business Acumen

• Able to translate business goals into infrastructure strategy and communicate it clearly to both technical teams and the C-suite
• Strong vendor management skills — able to negotiate commercial terms and hold vendors accountable to SLAs
• Financially literate: comfortable owning a budget, building business cases, and reporting on unit economics of cloud and AI spend
• Empathetic people leader who can attract strong talent, build team culture, and navigate the complexity of a post-acquisition environment
  
  

Certifications (Preferred)

• Google Professional Cloud Architect or AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
• Certified FinOps Practitioner (FinOps Foundation)
• CISSP, CISM, or equivalent security leadership certification
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional or Strategic Leader