Head of IT and Infrastructure

HEAD OF IT AND INFRASTRUCTURE

COMPANY : FLIGHTSTORY

ABOUT FLIGHTSTORY

We are a media company and investment fund, and we’re on a mission to elevate the stories, build the communities, and support the founders that inspire a happier, healthier humanity. We scale creator-led new media IP and operate an investment fund and venture studio.

YOUR MISSION

You’ll be our first dedicated IT and infrastructure employee, building the function from the ground up. You'll own the entire technology estate: devices, networks, cloud, and security. You'll be responsible for making it all work reliably as we scale.

The role will also include exciting opportunities developing the foundations for how we can safely move into the future of technology. For example, the maintenance and improvement of the infrastructure underpinning our AI agent platform which is becoming central to how the business operates and experiments.

You’ll work closely with our in-house developers across FlightStory and Studio Steven, who currently manage infrastructure alongside their product work. You'll shape FlightStory's IT infrastructure and systems from the ground up, setting the foundations, the standards, and the way everything runs, and then ensuring it keeps running.

DAY TO DAY

• Corporate IT: Device management, onboarding/offboarding, email, identity and access management across the team. You're the person who makes sure nobody's blocked.

• All cloud, internal hardware & infrastructure environments,VPS provisioning, cost optimisation, and the compute layer our AI agents run on. You'll monitor, maintain, and scale it.

• Network and Security: Firewalls, VPNs (including Tailscale), access controls, endpoint protection, and monitoring. You'll harden what exists and build what's missing.

• Compliance and Certification: Lead FlightStory through Cyber Essentials Plus certification and lay the groundwork for ISO 27001. Build the policies, controls, and documentation to get us there.

• AI Infrastructure: Reliable, monitored, cost-controlled infrastructure for a fleet of AI agents running across physical devices and VPS instances. You don't need to be an ML engineer, but you need to understand how agent workloads (will) behave and how to keep them running.

• Incident Response and DR: Design, document and implement disaster recovery, incident response plans, and runbooks so the business recovers fast when things go wrong.

• Self-Service and Documentation: Build internal tooling, documentation, and processes that reduce support burden and keep the team moving.

• Data tagging: Introduce (aligned with senior leadership) appropriate data tagging protocols and ensure appropriate access controls, encryption and cyber protection (e.g. air gaps) in place for data stored and used across the business

WE’RE WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• An expert in IT infrastructure, systems administration, or DevOps. The ideal candidate has spent time owning everything IT at a growing startup or scale-up.

• Hands-on cloud experience. Comfortable provisioning servers, managing VPS instances, and optimising cloud spend.

• Strong understanding of network security: firewalls, VPNs, access controls, monitoring, endpoint protection.

• Familiarity with UK compliance frameworks like Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001. You've either led or materially contributed to achieving them.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, or automation tooling (Terraform, Ansible, or similar).

• Comfortable owning AI/ML infrastructure: containers, GPU instances, API cost management, agent orchestration. We run internal AI agents in production and this role monitors them effectively & keeps them running reliably. A builder mentality. You want to create systems, not just keep the lights on.

• Strong communication skills. You can explain a security incident to a non-technical exec and write documentation that people actually read.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with Tailscale, Cloudflare, or other zero-trust networking models.

• Familiarity with Linux server administration (Ubuntu, systemd, SSH hardening).

• Background in media, creator economy, or fast-moving consumer-facing businesses.

• ITIL, CompTIA Security+, AWS Solutions Architect, GCP certifications, or similar.

WHAT WE OFFER

• A genuine greenfield opportunity: you’re building a function, not inheriting one.

• Direct access to senior leadership and real influence over how the company operates.

• A clear path to team leadership as the function grows.

• A collaborative, in-person team in Shoreditch who move fast and care about what they’re building.