The Company

Usborne is an independent, family business. With over 285 staff based across our London, Oxford, Wolverhampton and German offices we publish over 300 distinctive, engaging, accessible new books each year, and have nearly 3000 titles in print. These range from books for babies such as the bestselling That’s not my… series to YA fiction from acclaimed authors such as Holly Bourne – with everything from Magic Painting to Politics for Beginners in between.

The Role

The IT Manager role will lead the day-to-day support and operational management of all the Usborne Publishing systems and technologies as well as the effective management, mentoring and responsibility of the technical team. Reporting to the IT Director, you will be responsible for the delivery of IT infrastructure, cyber-security, business systems and support to our users.  Working closely with our technical delivery manager to deliver technical projects you will also support the IT Director in helping to shape the budgets and inform the strategic direction for technology in the company.

You will be joining at an important time as we are in the midst of a digital transformation programme implementing digital solutions that will drive our business forward in the future. We have a number of projects in flight and planned including the implementation of an ERP system, as well as infrastructure network comms and security upgrades. You will be key in helping to drive these projects and the operational technology that will support the business systems and will provide the security and availability and support to the users.

As our systems and infrastructure evolve constantly so you will be required to lead the projects to keep up to date with technology through the implementations, maintenance, upgrades, monitoring documentation to support this as well as provide technical and functional recommendations to the IT Director.

Experience and Skills

• Minimum of 3 years IT management experience building highly effective teams.

• Proven ITIL framework implementation knowledge.

• Good understanding of IT and cloud Infrastructure and its components.

• Ability to lead and manage multiple IT projects across the full technology and infrastructure stack and able to prioritise and balance time between long running and interrupt-driven tasks.

• Ability to successfully facilitate collaboration across multiple functions, departments, and levels, and serve as a role model for teamwork.

• Excellent working knowledge of hybrid, multi-cloud architectures and platforms including Azure, AWS, Cloudflare, Okta, etc.

• Ability to manage SaaS and hosted applications and to work and manage key relationships with suppliers.

• Experience and good working knowledge of web technologies, CMS’s, data lakes and data warehouses, sharepoint, MS Teams, AzureAD, O365, Networking, cyber-security framesworks (cyber-essentials plus or ISO 27001

• Exemplary communication and organisational skills, managing conflict, escalations, negotiating compromise and influencing others.

• Passionate about delivering excellent customer service, IT solutions and technology strategy.

• Able to travel to our other sites when required and to work flexibly outside of core work hours when needed.

Location and Benefits

We offer a 35-hour working week from our Farringdon offices in London with flexibility on some working from home after a successful induction period.

In addition to our transparent salary grading structure, for this role we also offer a range of benefits including:

• 25 days paid holiday entitlement plus bank holidays

• Healthcare Scheme for you and your dependents

• Comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme

• 50% Discount on Company Books 

• Industry leading Pension Scheme and Life Assurance

We particularly encourage applications from Black and minority ethnic candidates who are currently under-represented within this area.