Head of Technology Operations and IT Governance
Bahrain
Full Time
Experienced
Job Purpose:
We are seeking an experienced IT leader with deep expertise in architecture, software development, and application management. This role is responsible for driving and overseeing the development of our strategic digital channels, including the mobile app, system integrations, and core business applications. The position will lead delivery planning, prioritize the development roadmap, and manage development resources to ensure timely, high‑quality delivery. By centralizing technical leadership and modern development practices, this role accelerates innovation, strengthens governance, and ensures that our digital investments deliver scalable solutions, reduced technical debt, and long‑term competitive advantage
Additionally, the candidate will be responsible on the IT governance framework to define and maintain IT policies and procedures and will oversee IT risk assessments from a Risk Management & Compliance perspective and implement risk mitigation strategies as well as have a role to direct internal IT audits and coordinate with external auditors. In addition, overseeing IT change management, processes and control mechanisms is a function within IT that coordinates with Release Management.
Principal Responsibilities, Accountabilities and Deliverables of Role:
We are seeking an experienced IT leader with deep expertise in architecture, software development, and application management. This role is responsible for driving and overseeing the development of our strategic digital channels, including the mobile app, system integrations, and core business applications. The position will lead delivery planning, prioritize the development roadmap, and manage development resources to ensure timely, high‑quality delivery. By centralizing technical leadership and modern development practices, this role accelerates innovation, strengthens governance, and ensures that our digital investments deliver scalable solutions, reduced technical debt, and long‑term competitive advantage
Additionally, the candidate will be responsible on the IT governance framework to define and maintain IT policies and procedures and will oversee IT risk assessments from a Risk Management & Compliance perspective and implement risk mitigation strategies as well as have a role to direct internal IT audits and coordinate with external auditors. In addition, overseeing IT change management, processes and control mechanisms is a function within IT that coordinates with Release Management.
Principal Responsibilities, Accountabilities and Deliverables of Role:
- Lead end‑to‑end delivery planning across all development streams, ensuring clear prioritization, accurate estimation, and visibility of dependencies across teams.
- Oversee execution of the development roadmap, ensuring delivery timelines are met and proactively addressing delivery bottlenecks, blockers, or scope risks.
- Drive cross‑functional alignment between development teams, PMO, product owners, and business stakeholders to ensure cohesive delivery and transparent progress reporting.
- Provide architectural oversight for mobile applications, system integrations, APIs, and core business applications, ensuring scalable and secure design decisions.
- Govern solution architecture standards and ensure that all designs align with enterprise architecture principles and long‑term technology strategy.
- Guide development leads and architects in adopting modern development practices, engineering standards, and reusable frameworks.
- Manage internal development resources, including capacity planning, workload distribution, KPIs, and performance alignment.
- Oversee vendor development teams—including offshore and nearshore teams—ensuring alignment on delivery expectations, sprint planning, and productivity (as highlighted by vendor alignment issues similar to those raised in Escalation
- Maintain strong oversight of external solution providers, ensuring contractual obligations, SLAs, and integration dependencies are tightly managed.
- Drive strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing the software development lifecycle, including automation, DevOps enablement, CI/CD improvements, and code quality frameworks.
- Champion continuous improvement across development processes, enforcing standards around documentation, coding practices, and testing discipline.
- Introduce and oversee governance mechanisms to improve delivery predictability and reduce technical debt, consistent with objectives in organizational planning materials
- Identify, assess, and manage risks across development projects, including solution gaps, vendor‑related risks, delivery slippages, and architectural constraints.
- Ensure development activities are conducted within IT governance frameworks, and coordinate with relevant IT governance functions for audits, compliance checks, and policy alignment
- Work closely with PMO and stakeholders to ensure transparent escalation, mitigation planning, and monitoring of high‑risk initiatives.
- Oversight the solutions for the mobile app and the backend integration and support the architecture team
- Drive overall architectural design strategies for the bank with the support of the architecture team
- Ensure that all team leads are aligned and working towards common goals. Facilitate regular meetings to discuss progress, challenges, and dependencies between teams.
- Provide guidance to development teams to maintain high standards of software quality and ensure best practices are followed.
- Drive industry standard development strategies and promote the same inside the bank across the teams.
- Manage IT governance framework to define and maintain IT policies and procedures
- Oversight IT Risk assessment from a risk management & compliance perspective and implement risk mitigation strategies
- Work directly with internal IT audit and coordinate with external auditors.
- Oversight IT change management, processes and control mechanisms with release management.
- Identifying and addressing any skill gaps within the Development team.
- Ensure that all deliverables meet the required quality standards.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation of all development activities. Provide regular updates to PMO on project progress, and to Head of IT on resource utilization, and any issues that need to be addressed
- Lead the Agile ceremonies, such as backlog grooming, sprint planning and task estimation.
- Gather and address technical and design requirements
- Follow emerging technologies and support the development teams by ensuring solutions and application architecture are optimized and aligned to cloud well-architected frameworks
- Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing management of disaster recovery strategies to ensure minimal disruption and rapid recovery of critical systems in the event of incidents
- Minimum of 10 years of experience in Architecture, Development and Banking application, particularly in Core Banking Implementation and Integration in a cloud environment
- Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong leadership and interpersonal skills
- Proven ability to deliver projects on time and within budget in a cloud environment
- Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
- Infrastructure and cloud background
- Designing the architecture for solutions
- Managing cross functional teams
- Understanding of Agile way of working on managing teams
- Familiarity with different emerging infrastructure technologies
- Understanding of the architecture design patterns
- Understanding of the emerging integration approaches
- Minimum of a Bachelors Degree in related field
- Additional certifications or qualifications are a plus
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