Application Portfolio Manager (high-growth, M&A/PE environment)

Our client is am ambitious, high-growth, acquisitive PE-backed business based in central London (4 days per week in the office).

Every acquisition brings new applications, contracts, and vendor relationships. Some are excellent; some overlap with what we already have; some were purchased locally and have never been reviewed at group level. They need someone to bring order, visibility, and discipline to this landscape so that every pound they spend on technology is justified, governed, and delivering value.

The Role

They are looking for an Application Portfolio Manager who can build and own the discipline. This is not a role where you inherit a mature framework and operate it. You will design the processes, build the governance, and establish the ways of working that ensure that the software and technology services estate is actively managed through its full lifecycle: from identification and selection, through deployment and operation, to retirement.

You will report to the Head of IT Services and work closely with procurement, legal, finance, the wider IT team and business stakeholders across the group. For the highest-value vendor relationships, you will provide portfolio intelligence and technical insight to the senior relationship owners, ensuring they have the information they need to make good decisions. For the long tail of smaller vendors and regionally purchased tools, you will be the primary owner: rationalising, consolidating, and ensuring nothing falls through the gaps.

This is a building role with genuine growth potential. You will design the process and then scale it across a rapidly growing organisation. If you want to shape how a PE-backed business governs its technology estate, not just administer what already exists, this is the opportunity.

Key Responsibilities

• Application Lifecycle Governance

: You will own the end-to-end application lifecycle at Lomond, applying consistent governance from the point a need is identified through to eventual retirement. This means designing and embedding the processes that do not yet exist, not waiting for someone else to hand you a playbook.

• Portfolio Intelligence and Rationalisation:

You will provide the insight that enables good decisions about our technology estate, both for individual applications and across the portfolio as a whole.

• Process Design and Cross-functional Partnership:

The processes that govern how Lomond selects, purchases, onboards, and retires technology do not yet exist in a structured form. A core part of this role is designing them, in partnership with the Head of IT Services, procurement, legal, and finance.

• Commercial Administration

: You will maintain the commercial backbone of the application estate, ensuring contracts, renewals, and licensing are actively managed rather than passively consumed.

Required Experience

Must Have

• Demonstrable experience in application portfolio management, IT asset management, or a closely related discipline involving software estate governance in organisations of 500+ employees, ideally with experience of rapid growth or acquisition-driven scaling

• Proven ability to build frameworks and processes, not just operate existing ones: you have designed governance from scratch or materially improved what you inherited

• Experience managing technology vendor relationships at a commercial and governance level, including contract tracking, licence management, and renewal preparation

• Enough technical understanding to evaluate how applications fit within a wider technology ecosystem: integration points, data flows, SSO and authentication, and API connectivity. You do not need to be an engineer, but you need to ask the right questions and understand the answers

• Experience working cross-functionally with procurement, legal, finance, and business stakeholders to deliver structured outcomes

• Comfortable producing clear, data-driven reporting for senior leadership audiences

Nice to Have

• ITIL certification or equivalent service management framework experience

• Experience with Microsoft 365 licensing and SaaS cost governance at scale

• PE-backed business experience; familiarity with exit readiness, investor due diligence, and the expectation to demonstrate efficient technology spend

• M&A integration experience, particularly managing the technology implications of high-volume acquisitions

• Property, distributed retail, franchise, or multi-site service business experience