Group Leader Systems Operations

As Group Leader Systems Operations, you lead a diverse team and define how NEXUS operates systems for itself and together with users and partners. You create clarity across responsibilities, reduce friction, and establish predictable service delivery that enables projects to succeed in practice.

• Team leadership: lead, mentor, and develop a diverse team with different professional backgrounds and ways of working.
• Operational ownership: take responsibility for the reliable operation of internal and partner-facing systems within an agreed scope, including deployments, environments, access patterns, and day-to-day stability.
• Transition and lifecycle management: define and run handovers from development into controlled test phases and longer-running operation, including acceptance criteria, documentation, and ownership boundaries.
• Regulated and structured execution: coordinate work that requires regulatory awareness, certification constraints, validated processes, or strict documentation, for example in clinical study settings.
• Stakeholder and expectation management: proactively manage expectations, resolve conflicts early, and translate between technical realities and user needs, preventing misunderstandings from turning into escalations.
• Service delivery and prioritization: run intake, triage, and prioritization across multiple parallel demands, balancing urgency, risk, and value with transparent decision-making.
• Reliability practices: establish pragmatic standards for monitoring, backups, change management, and access control. This role does not require on-call, but it does require ownership and predictability.
• Cross-team collaboration: work closely with Software Engineering, Clinical Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, and Screening & Lab Automation to keep end-to-end delivery coherent.
• Process improvement: simplify and standardize where it helps, without creating bureaucracy.
• Resource management: plan capacity, priorities, and reporting for the group across a growing portfolio of operational commitments.

Quick Self-Check

You will thrive in this role if:

• You enjoy stabilising, operating, and continuously improving systems over time - not just building greenfield solutions.
• You create clarity, calm, and reliability in complex stakeholder environments.
• You are comfortable navigating difficult conversations, conflict, and escalation, and can resolve them constructively.
• You proactively clarify ownership and are willing to define and enforce it when needed.
• You combine technical depth with strong people skills and structured execution.
• You enjoy leading with responsibility for both people and service outcomes, not just technical delivery.
• You like building operational processes that reduce friction without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
• You are comfortable working across diverse profiles, from engineers to clinical operations and other non-technical stakeholders.

Non-Negotiables:

• Proven leadership experience in operations, platform engineering, site reliability, clinical operations, or comparable roles with delivery responsibility.
• Strong stakeholder skills: align expectations, negotiate trade-offs, resolve conflicts constructively.
• Experience running systems or operational processes in environments where reliability, documentation, and access control matter.
• Ability to translate between technical teams and users without overloading others with technical detail.
• Solid technical foundation to engage with engineers on deployment, environments, automation, and system reliability.
• Excellent communication skills in English.

Strongly Expected:

• Experience defining operating models, handover criteria, and service boundaries between teams.
• Comfort with structured documentation and traceability when required by context.

Advantageous:

• Experience in healthcare, clinical research operations, or hospital environments.
• Familiarity with security-conscious deployments and pragmatic risk management.
• Knowledge of German.