A&O Shearman is a global industry-leading law firm, with nearly 50 offices in 28countries worldwide. Our fluency in English law, US law, and the laws of the world’s most dynamic markets, enables us to provide unmatched insight and seamless delivery to clients. We work on challenging and important deals and disputes that have the potential to shape the future.
We offer exceptional opportunities for our people; opportunities to work for the world’s leading businesses; to transform the status quo, and to deliver your best work, helping you and your career to thrive, while delivering unparalleled outcomes for our clients.
Whether you're helping clients solve complex challenges, transforming the ways we manage our business, or ensuring the smooth running of our operations, this is an environment where you can belong and excel. We provide first-rate training and development; we are committed to an inclusive environment, and we provide support and ways of working that help you optimize your wellbeing.
What truly defines a career with us? We recruit the best and ask for the best of you. And together, we will redefine success.
Role Purpose
The Operations Engineer is responsible for leading and evolving day‑to‑day IT operations for APAC while driving the adoption of modern, secure, and scalable technologies including the firm’s cloud platforms that enhance legal workflows, fee-earner productivity, and client service. This role combines operational responsibilities with forward‑looking technology enablement, ensuring the firm’s core platforms remain highly available, resilient, compliant, and continuously improving.
The Operations Engineer supports and executes the firm’s IT and innovation strategy across infrastructure operations including the firm’s cloud platform which runs many of the firm’s core business services, endpoint management, service management, incident response, and user adoption, while upholding the confidentiality, regulatory, and data protection obligations critical to the legal industry.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Ensure operational stability across a 24/7 global environment, responding effectively to incidents with clear communication, sound judgment, and urgency.
- Oversee the day-to-day operations during APAC business hours, availability, performance, and reliability of core legal and business systems, including document management, case management, email, and collaboration platforms.
- Evaluate new technologies, manage technology pilots and proof of concept, assess risk, and return on investment prior to broader adoption.
- Work with IT architecture, security, and engineering teams to ensure new solutions align with global standards and meet regional or local needs.
- Work on assigned projects with the relevant technical and business stakeholders as the technical liaison or technical project manager / lead. Projects can be diverse ranging from office relocation to network connectivity upgrade and systems upgrade.
- Collaborate with engineering resources to implement and manage Microsoft Intune for endpoint management across Windows and iOS devices ensuring that security and useability remain forefront to the program
- Oversee modern device lifecycle management, including provisioning, patching, updates, encryption, compliance enforcement, and secure decommissioning.
- Monitor endpoint health and security posture, proactively addressing issues to minimize downtime and operational impact.
- Serve as a technical operational liaison between IT teams, lawyers and business teams, and third-party vendors to ensure solutions meet user needs and firm standards.
- Work with the business / end users to identify operational pain points and translate requirements into effective technology outcomes.
- Evaluate the existing infrastructure from both operational and usage perspective, proactively identify and propose solutions to optimise performance, improve user experience, and reduce organisational costs.
- Assist the Senior IT Operations Manager with vendor relationship management, service performance, and contractual obligations to ensure value and service quality.
- Assist with enforcing cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory requirements to meet the firm’s Information Security needs in line with legal industry standards, including confidentiality obligations, eDiscovery considerations, and client data protection standards.
- Ensure operational processes and technologies align with internal governance frameworks and external client security expectations.
- Assist in the review, validation, and approval of change control requests, ensure change is aligned with regional considerations, including APAC time zone differences, regional settings, and local regulatory or compliance obligations.
- Develop and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and knowledge bases to support service continuity, change management, and incident response.
- Provide some technical leadership and knowledge sharing to IT support teams.
- Collaborate closely with operational teams across the global IT teams including Cloud Ops, third line support, security and third parties such as Microsoft.
- Establish strong working relationships with IT colleagues in APAC including front-line support and managers in the region.
- Deputise for the Senior IT Operations Manager during periods of leave or absence, or upon request.
- Perform other duties and responsibilities as assigned.
Key Requirements
- 7 years of experience in IT operations and systems engineering within a complex, networked enterprise environment, with demonstrated thought leadership and knowledge share.
- Demonstrated experience of managing high-severity incidents to resolution, carrying out root cause analysis, implementing preventative measures and resilience strategies.
- Proven experience supporting end users in a service-oriented, customer-focused role, preferably within a professional services or legal environment.
- Strong working knowledge of enterprise systems, Microsoft Infrastructure (e.g. Windows Infrastructures, SQL, AD, Virtualization,etc), cloud platforms, collaboration tools, and modern endpoint management solutions.
- Hands on experience with modern device management (e.g., Microsoft Intune, Autopilot, conditional access, security baselines).
- Strong understanding of cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory requirements relevant to legal services or similarly regulated industries.
- Experience working with global teams, effective in engaging and managing stakeholders offshore, and developing strong relationships.
- Experienced managing global, regional and local third-party vendors, holding them accountable to service delivery.
- Demonstrated a team player attitude, a culture of accountability, reliability and continuous improvement.
- Tenacious in delivering outcome for the business. Takes ownership of issues and projects and drives them to resolution or desired outcome. “Can do” attitude and commitment to continuous learning and applying new knowledge at work.
- ITIL v3 Foundation certification or equivalent operational service management experience.
- Degree required; additional technical education or industry certifications strongly preferred.
Desirable
- Familiarity with emerging cloud technologies (AI workloads, edge computing, quantum cloud services)
- Certifications in either Azure, AWS or GCP
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