Head of IT

Full Relocation | Dubai, UAE | On site | Permanent | AED 38,000 to 48,000 per month, inclusive of housing and transport, tax free

The short version

We are a new government company in Dubai. There is no corporate IT yet: no tenant, no laptops, no service desk, no policies. Over the next few years we grow from a few dozen people to several hundred.

You are accountable for budget, corporate IT, and information security from day one.

How we work

Our motto is “Design in house. Build bought. Run in house”. You decide how things should work. Vendors do most of the implementation. Then it comes back to you and your team to operate. That middle step is where this role lives or dies: you have to be able to tell whether what the vendor delivered is actually what you designed.

The first eighteen months

There is a plan, sequenced down to project level. You are not handed a blank page. You are also not handed something finished, and we expect you to change it once you are in the seat.

Wave one, 2026

• Stand up our own Microsoft 365 and Entra tenant with a hardened baseline from day one. Identity, MFA, email, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Intune.
• Get managed, protected laptops into people's hands.

Wave two, into 2027

• Sanctioned collaboration and AI tooling on single sign-on.
• Launch the service desk and the asset register. One front door for IT, with incidents, requests and a real asset list behind it.

From late 2027: security monitoring with a managed SOC, the policy and risk framework, privileged access, vulnerability management, data protection, then the cloud platform.

Why people take this job

You choose the stack. No inherited decisions to work around, no ten-year-old system nobody is allowed to touch, no compromises made by someone who left in 2019. What gets built is what you designed.

The budget is real. You are responsible for the budget and choosing proper tooling and services.

You keep what you earn. No personal income tax here. The number in the offer is the number that reaches your bank account. Full relocation support.

The role grows as the company does. What starts small ends as a real function with helpdesk, network, cloud and applications teams under it. You hire them.

Where you need to be strong

Nobody knows all of this. We have split it deliberately.

Deep and hands-on: Microsoft 365 and Entra ID tenant design, conditional access, Intune, Defender. Security operations and the controls behind them. Service desk and incident management as a practice you have actually run. Scoping vendor work and verifying what comes back.

Solid enough to direct others: Azure landing zone, networking, backup and monitoring. Purview, data loss prevention, classification. Identity governance, privileged access, joiner-mover-leaver. Policy, risk register, supplier security. Cost control.

Familiar is enough: Data platform and BI. CRM, contract lifecycle, website CMS. GitHub and pipeline security. Specialist equipment and IoT. Know what good looks like and who to hire, not how to configure it.

Must have skills

When something breaks badly, you open the console yourself. Vendors build, and a managed provider will run the SOC, but you cannot be a person who phones a supplier and waits to be told what happened.

Around 10 to 15 years in IT, with real infrastructure and security depth. If you have run IT for a company of a few hundred people, that is the right size of experience. We are not looking for someone who has done this at ten thousand.

You should have worked somewhere with a real compliance regime, whichever one it was: ISO 27001, POPIA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, King IV, NIST CSF.

To apply

Send your CV or LinkedIn profile to careers@systemtwoconsulting.com

Pay: R274 931,34 - R1 394 860,17 per month

Work Location: In person