Director, Global Modern Workplace at Dentsu in London

Job description

Job Description: The Director of Modern Workplace is a strategic technology leader responsible for designing, delivering, and leading the complete modern workplace ecosystem. This role directs cross-functional engineering teams, working in a matrix reporting environment, to build secure, productive, and seamless work experiences across global endpoints, collaboration platforms, identity systems, and applications. The Director owns the architectural vision, strategic direction, and user adoption of modern workplace services while serving as the primary escalation point for complex incidents and cross-platform issues. The Director manages multi-million dollar budgets, develops precise forecasts, scales engineering teams and solutions to support organisational growth, and builds efficiency into the operating model by leveraging self-service capabilities, AI-powered automation, and continuous process optimisation. Reports To: Chief Information Officer (CIO) Key Responsibilities: Strategic Leadership & Vision: Partner with organisational leaders to align strategy, develop solutions and resolve complex problems Define and communicate modern workplace strategy aligned with business objectives, security requirements and the technology roadmap Set architectural standards and design principles for collaboration, workforce identity, endpoints and applications Drive digital transformation to improve employee productivity, experience and operational efficiency Establish governance for licensing, vendors, compliance and cost optimisation Champion security and workforce governance across modern workplace services Resolve conflicts between IT operational standards and business needs collaboratively Influence peer engineering leaders and business stakeholders without direct authority Collaboration Platforms Engineering: Own global Microsoft 365 design and delivery (Office, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive) and supporting tools (Power Platform, Slack, Dropbox, Miro) Set collaboration governance, data classification, retention and DLP standards Optimise M365 licensing and manage third-party collaboration integrations Govern AI agents and copilots within collaboration platforms Drive adoption of modern collaboration practices while maintaining security Identity & Access Engineering: Lead workforce identity design and implementation (Active Directory and Entra ID) as foundational security controls Establish global identity lifecycle management (ILM) for joiners, movers, leavers, rehires and contractors across regions and platforms Implement identity governance, access reviews and reporting for least-privilege access and compliance (SOX, GDPR, ISO 27001) Oversee workforce privileged access management (PAM) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) strategies Manage non-human identities (service accounts, application credentials, API tokens) across on-premises and cloud infrastructure Ensure resilient, auditable identity systems and rapid threat response; manage hybrid AD and Entra ID environments Endpoints & Remote Applications Engineering: Lead strategy and operations for Windows, macOS and emerging endpoint platforms Oversee Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), remote application delivery and virtual workspace infrastructure Set endpoint security, patching, compliance and device management policies Deliver application lifecycle management, endpoint provisioning and image management Implement centralised endpoint analytics and reporting for visibility and compliance Support BYOD and contractor device policies within security and governance boundaries Enable remote and hybrid work with secure, high-performing endpoint technologies Operational Leadership & Escalation: Set operational governance, SLAs, KPIs and metrics across modern workplace services Equip operations teams to resolve issues independently through processes, tools and knowledge management (runbooks, automation, decision trees) Act as primary escalation point for critical incidents, complex p