At some point, many IT Operations leadership roles stop feeling like you’re genuinely building or improving anything meaningful.

The environment is mature, the processes already exist, and over time the role becomes more about maintaining what’s already there than improving it. For a lot of strong IT Operations leaders, that’s where progression starts to flatten.

This opportunity offers something very different.

Garvan Institute of Medical Research is looking for an IT Operations Manager to help strengthen and evolve a broad operational environment supporting approximately 1,000 users across one of Australia’s leading biomedical research institutes.

This is a role where your decisions, leadership and operational influence are highly visible across the organisation. The teams are lean, the environment moves quickly and there’s a genuine expectation that leader’s step in, make decisions and improve things rather than escalating everything through layers of process.

It’s the kind of role that tends to suit people who enjoy building momentum and making an impact rather than simply keeping the lights on.

About Garvan Institute of Medical Research

Garvan Institute of Medical Research is internationally recognised for its work across genomics, cancer research, immunology and precision medicine. Technology underpins everything from enterprise operations through to advanced scientific research and collaboration.

The stakeholder group itself is one of the more unique parts of the role. Researchers, academics and technical specialists regularly push the boundaries of what technology can enable, creating a far more intellectually curious environment than most traditional corporate settings.

Unlike heavily standardised enterprise environments, Garvan Institute of Medical Research operates across a broad mix of technologies and platforms shaped by the needs of researchers, operational teams and scientific collaboration.

The technology landscape spans Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, GCP, AWS, Windows and Linux infrastructure, VMware, collaboration technologies and distributed research computing environments.

The Opportunity

This role leads a team of 8 spanning infrastructure, systems administration, Service Desk, end-user support and collaboration technologies across a broad and highly visible operational environment.

Importantly, this is not a broken environment or turnaround situation. The foundations are good. The team is capable, stable and knowledgeable, and significant progress has already been made over the last 18 months.

The opportunity is improving how the environment operates rather than rebuilding it from scratch, bringing more consistency, accountability and structure to the function.

Current priorities include:

• Service Desk uplift and automation
• Increasing self-service capability
• Simplifying collaboration tooling
• Improving dashboards and reporting
• Replacing an ageing telephony platform
• Reducing manual operational overhead

Garvan Institute of Medical Research is looking for someone with energy, curiosity and a genuine bias toward improvement. Someone who enjoys leading people, improving how things operate and staying close enough to the detail to make good decisions.

This role would likely frustrate someone most comfortable operating in heavily layered enterprise or government-style environments where ownership is narrower and decisions move slowly.

Why This Role Is Different

Very few IT Operations roles at this level combine this level of operational ownership, leadership visibility and exposure to such a technically sophisticated stakeholder environment.

The role reports directly to the Head of IT, who joined Garvan Institute of Medical Research following a senior leadership career across global pharmaceutical organisations. A major theme throughout the briefing process was the organisation’s desire to actively mentor and develop the successful individual over time.

Importantly, the role is also viewed as a genuine long-term succession pathway into broader technology leadership within the organisation.

For someone currently operating inside a narrower infrastructure or service delivery remit, this role offers the chance to broaden both operational ownership and leadership exposure in a way many larger environments simply can’t.

What You’ll Bring

You bring:

• Experience leading broad IT Operations and Service Delivery environments where infrastructure, support and stakeholder management intersect
• Strong operational grounding across infrastructure, cloud and end-user environments
• Experience improving service maturity, automation and operational processes
• Strong stakeholder and people leadership capability
• A pragmatic, hands-on and solutions-oriented mindset
• Energy, curiosity and comfort operating within broad, fast-moving environments

For a confidential discussion, please contact Anthony Trimboli on 0422 604 *** or *******@xceltium.com, or Steven Fulop on 0418 994 *** or ******@xceltium.com

Please note: xceltium has been appointed as the retained partner on this search. Any direct or third-party applications will be forwarded to xceltium.