Regional Lead, IT Site Infrastructure Operations - MEA

What you will do

As the Regional Lead for Site Infrastructure Operations (SIO), you will provide leadership and direction for the SIO Team across the Middle East & Africa region. You will be accountable for ensuring that your team delivers high-quality IT services, operational excellence, and continuous improvement in alignment with enterprise standards, business needs, and SIO strategic objectives.

You will lead a distributed team of Site Infrastructure Operations professionals and foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, customer focus, and operational excellence. You will serve as a trusted partner for business and IT stakeholders while supporting the execution of the global SIO strategy and regional priorities. You will lead the region toward our North Star, the Autonomous Digital Workplace: an environment that manages, heals, and improves itself, so our people get the same intelligent experience JCI builds into the smart, autonomous spaces we sell.

How you will do it

Strategic Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop Site Infrastructure Operations professionals, ensuring clarity of purpose and accountability.
• Set regional SIO priorities aligned with enterprise IT, Digital Workplace, and business objectives.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, customer focus, and continuous improvement.
• Support workforce planning, succession planning, and talent development across the regional team.
• Lead structured change management efforts to support the successful adoption of new IT processes, technologies, and operating models.
• Drive accountability for regional OKRs and performance objectives aligned with global SIO priorities.

Operational Excellence & Service Delivery

• Ensure delivery of Site Infrastructure Operations services across the region.
• Support implementation of IT security standards, compliance requirements, and enterprise policies.
• Drive adoption of automation, standardization, and process optimization across SIO functions.
• Ensure services meet SLAs and follow enterprise Service Management processes.
• Support Frontline Forward initiatives that improve user experience while increasing operational efficiency.
• Monitor operational performance, customer experience, and service quality metrics, driving continuous improvement actions where required.

Autonomous Digital Workplace (North Star)

• Build toward autonomy - Ensure every SIO service in the region has a path to self-healing; measure progress by tickets avoided, not just closed, and champion AIOps, autonomous patching, and predictive remediation over monitoring alone.
• Experience is the scoreboard - Adopt experience-level thinking (XLA) across the region: sentiment, friction, login and time-to-productive matter as much as uptime and SLA attainment.
• One data spine, AI-ready - Treat CMDB and ServiceNow accuracy as a strategic asset, not an audit checkbox; eliminate shadow spreadsheets and parallel records so automation and AI agents can reason over one source of truth.
• Automate the obvious, elevate the team - Drive automation of repeatable work and reinvest the time saved into architecture, capability growth, and higher-value engineering for the regional team.
• Be the reference customer - Pilot new capabilities on ourselves first and make the MEA workplace a credible proof point of JCI’s own technology story: if it isn’t good enough to demo, it isn’t good enough to ship to our own people.

Project & Initiative Oversight

• Support enterprise and business unit projects, ensuring timely execution and successful outcomes.
• Oversee regional SIO initiatives and transformation activities.
• Support the deployment and adoption of global SIO capabilities, standards, tools, and best practices.
• Ensure alignment of projects and initiatives with business priorities, strategic goals, and SIO objectives.
• Promote cross-functional collaboration to deliver sustainable operational improvements.

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Serve as an escalation point for SIO issues within the region.
• Build strong relationships with business leaders, site leadership teams, Digital Workplace partners, and other IT stakeholders.
• Drive stakeholder engagement activities to strengthen partnerships and improve service perception.
• Gather stakeholder feedback and insights to identify improvement opportunities and influence priorities.
• Oversee vendor management and ensure service quality from third-party providers.

Financial & Resource Management

• Support regional SIO budget planning and forecasting activities.
• Manage resource allocation to ensure appropriate service coverage and operational effectiveness.
• Monitor operational performance, financial results, and service quality metrics.
• Drive cost optimization opportunities while maintaining service quality and business alignment.

What we look for

• 8+ years of progressive IT leadership experience, including leading distributed teams.
• Experience leading IT operations across multiple sites, countries, or regions.
• Proven ability to drive operational excellence, continuous improvement, and service transformation.
• Strong strategic, analytical, project management, stakeholder management, and communication skills.
• Experience with IT service management, compliance, and vendor management.
• Demonstrated ability to build high-performing teams and develop future leaders.
• Experience driving change management and adoption of new technologies and operating models.
• Ability to build strong business partnerships and influence stakeholders across a matrixed organization.
• Experience working within global organizations and collaborating across regions.
• Familiarity with self-healing/automation, experience-level management (XLA), and ServiceNow/CMDB-driven operations or a clear appetite to lead a team toward that autonomous end state.