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