Head of New Services Development

We’re looking for someone to join GÉANT’s Services leadership team to turn emerging needs, ideas, and technologies into the next generation of services for the European research and education community.

You’ll sit at the intersection of strategy, community need, and technological opportunity. Working closely with NRENs, research communities, and internal teams, you’ll identify where GÉANT can create new value, test and shape ideas, and help promising concepts move from early exploration into services that can be taken to scale.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll lead a small, multidisciplinary team, but you’ll also stay close to the work yourself – speaking directly with stakeholders, sense-checking assumptions, building early momentum, and shaping service propositions in their earliest stages.

This role suits someone who is comfortable working with ambiguity, enjoys connecting people and ideas, and gets real satisfaction from turning loosely defined opportunities into concrete, community-backed services.

About the Role

What You’ll Do

New Service Discovery and Development

You’ll actively scan the research and education landscape to identify unmet needs, emerging technologies, and partnership opportunities that could form the basis of new GÉANT services. You’ll lead structured discovery and innovation activities, from early exploration and stakeholder validation through to business case development and handover to product or delivery teams. You’ll maintain a clear pipeline of new service ideas at different stages of maturity and help decide where to focus time and effort.

Strategy Alignment and Portfolio Insight

You’ll work closely with the Head of Services Strategy to ensure new service initiatives align with GÉANT’s strategic direction and portfolio priorities. You’ll contribute to strategic planning cycles, bringing insights from community engagement, market developments, and technology trends. You’ll ensure learning from new service exploration feeds back into broader strategy and portfolio decision-making.

Community and Stakeholder Engagement

You’ll build strong relationships with NRENs, research communities, European institutions, and industry partners to co-develop ideas and form early adopter communities. You’ll represent GÉANT in relevant working groups, task forces, and external forums. Internally, you’ll collaborate closely with Trust and Identity, Security, Cloud, and Products and Services teams to ensure coherence across the services portfolio.

Team Leadership and Ways of Working

You’ll lead and develop a small team of service developers and programme staff, creating a culture of experimentation, pragmatism, and community focus. You’ll provide clear direction while giving space for exploration and learning. You’ll report to the Chief Services Officer and contribute actively to wider services leadership and decision-making.

About You

You may be a good fit for this role if you:

• Have deep familiarity with the research and education networking ecosystem, including NRENs, GÉANT, or similar regional organisations
• Have experience developing new services or products from early concept through to initial adoption, ideally in a community-driven or not-for-profit environment
• Are confident engaging a wide and diverse group of stakeholders and building consensus across distributed communities
• Are comfortable operating with ambiguity and able to structure loosely defined opportunities into clear, actionable proposals
• Have experience leading or mentoring small teams
• Work well across strategic and operational boundaries, collaborating with strategy, product, and portfolio colleagues

It would be a bonus if you also have:

• A technical background in areas such as networking, identity and access management, data, security, education, or cloud services
• Experience working in EU-funded project environments or collaborative governance settings
• Experience using service design methods or lean innovation approaches
• A track record of working across organisational, national, or cultural boundaries

About Us

GÉANT is at the heart of research and education networking, offering talented people the opportunity to be part of something meaningful and worthwhile. With 150 employees based in Amsterdam and Cambridge, together we deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale. Thanks to our terabit network, 50 million researchers, scientists, academics and students can share record volumes of data unconstrained by location, solving some of humankind’s biggest challenges. Work at GÉANT and you’ll be supporting critical research into sustainable energy, deep space, high-energy physics, earth observation, environmental disasters, medicine and much more.

Benefits of working for GÉANT

You’ll receive excellent benefits at GÉANT – we offer a generous holiday allowance and a 5% end of year bonus/allowance as standard. The other benefits you receive will depend on the country you are employed in, but these will include an appropriate pension scheme and medical insurance.

Working Arrangements

We have adopted a flexible-hybrid model which means that employees will work flexibly between a remote and office environment. Weekly visits to the office are required for most employees to support our values and collaborative culture and enable our teams to deliver great work. For this role we anticipate that you may be required in the office for around 2 days per week.