Job description

Role Information

• Department: HR
• Location: Head Office, UAE 
• Reporting To (Line Manager): CFO
• Direct Reports (if any): 5
• Employment Type: Full-time

As the Global HR Director this role will support our global workforce of over +800 professionals through a critical period of evolution and requires a high-impact, transformational leader who can design and execute a global people strategy aimed at professionalising our HR operations for the next phase of growth. The expectation is that this role will be the architect for implementing a new culture and values, employing best-practice performance frameworks and enabling our new target organisational design that ensures excellence across all functions. Beyond owning the traditional HR oversight responsibilities we are looking for a commercially astute leader who can operate at pace, lead from the front, make bold decisions and turn the strategic vision into tangible results.

Core HR Responsibilities

• Global HR Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop the existing HR team to achieve best-in-class performance. Utilise your expertise to evaluate the current function and determine the optimal structure, reporting lines, and individual responsibilities to drive efficiency.
• Global HR Oversight: Direct the daily operations of a distributed HR function, ensuring consistent, high-quality service delivery across all international territories.
• Reward & Benefits: Manage global compensation structures, payroll alignment, and benefits packages to ensure the business remains competitive and compliant in every region.
• Talent Acquisition & Lifecycle: Oversee end-to-end recruitment strategies to attract top-tier software and managed services talent, while managing seamless onboarding and offboarding.
• Employee Relations & Compliance: Act as the final point of escalation for complex ER matters, including sensitive investigations, disciplinary matters, formal grievances and ensure the business remains fully compliant with diverse local labor laws.
• Data Integrity & Insight: Maintain the accuracy of people data and utilize HR analytics to provide the executive team with regular insights into headcount, turnover, and engagement for our monthly board reporting.

Transformational responsibilities:

• Organizational Design: Support the management team in executing the newly designed target operating model from an HR standpoint.
• Performance Management: Overhaul legacy appraisal systems to design and implement a high-performance culture focused on measurable outcomes, continuous feedback, and professional rigor.
• Culture & Values Integration: Lead the road map for a new culture and values, embedding them into every touchpoint of the employee experience to drive unity.
• Strategic Incentive Design: Partner with the executive management team to architect and implement global bonus plans that are directly mapped to core business outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Diagnose & Professionalise processes: Audit and overhaul existing legacy processes to instill corporate best practices, moving the business from a reactive to a proactive HR model.
• Succession & Leadership Development: Identify high-potential talent and build robust succession plans to ensure the business is "growth-ready" at the leadership level.
• Future Policy Redesign: Lead a comprehensive diagnostic and overhaul of all existing HR policies and processes and transform legacy frameworks into modern, scalable, and agile future-state systems.
• Retention & Turnover Strategy: Develop and execute a data-driven global strategy to increase employee retention and significantly reduce staff turnover. This involves diagnosing the root causes of attrition and implementing targeted initiatives - from engagement programs to enhanced career pathways - that foster long-term commitment and stability across all regions.
• Benchmarking: Establish a rigorous annual benchmarking process to evaluate our compensation and benefits packages against global industry standards. Ensure our total reward offering remains highly competitive within the managed services and software sectors to attract and retain top-tier talent.

• Provide a 180 day plan for core responsibilities & priorities.
• Quality & accuracy of deliverables.
• Timeliness of project or task completion.
• Stakeholder / customer satisfaction levels.
• Team productivity & engagement.
• Compliance with policies and regulatory standards.
• Staff turnover rates / survey engagement and ratings.

• Executive HR Leadership: 15+ years of progressive HR experience, including at least 5 years as a HR Director within a global organization.
• High Energy & Gravitas: Charismatic, highly motivated, and driven to operate at pace while confidently influencing board-level stakeholders
• Sector Expertise: Proven experience within a managed services or professional services model. Needs to understand the commercial drivers of a business where timesheets, billable hours, and utilization are core to the organizational makeup.
• Transformational Toolkit: Track record of professionalizing HR functions with expertise across the full HR valu