Senior Infrastructure Manager

Description:

We are looking for a Senior Infrastructure Manager who is, first and foremost, a people leader.

In this role, your primary responsibility is the health, performance, and career growth of your engineering team. While you must possess a solid technical background to understand the challenges your team faces, your day-to-day focus will not be hands-on technical work. Instead, you will use your experience to remove blockers, guide decision-making, and ensure your engineers have the environment they need to succeed.

You will act as the bridge between technical execution and business strategy, team budget management, defining roadmaps, and ensuring operational excellence across a complex hybrid (predominantly on-prem and some cloud) estate.

The Team You Will Lead

You will lead the Infrastructure Solutions team within the wider Technical Operations department. Your engineers are responsible for building the environment, delivering projects as requested by Engineering and Product, and ensuring we remain available, scalable, and secure. They are not responsible for the BAU function of the platforms that is managed by another team within Technical Operations. The Infrastructure Solutions team takes a concept or idea and makes that into a reality within the boundaries and constraints of our platforms.

You will be managing a team of engineers who individually possess experience in:
On-Premise Linux systems, Container solutions, Debian packaging, Ansible, data streaming and queuing technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
Advanced database management knowledge (MySQL, Postgres) in replicated environments.
Physical Network management, with an on-prem estate that is Juniper focused.
Cloud environments: GCP and AWS
Platform engineer focused on building, maintaining and supporting an Internal Developer Platform (CI/CD)

The Operational Reality

It is important to be transparent about the environment you are joining. We operate at high velocity with a broad and complex technology estate. However, we are a lean team, not a giant corporation with endless resources.
Context Switching is the Norm
You will rarely have the luxury of focusing on a single task for weeks at a time. You will be required to shift focus multiple times a week, and sometimes multiple times a day, as business priorities evolve.
Agility over Silos
Because we are a lean team, we wear many hats. You must be comfortable pivoting from a strategic discussion to an operational challenge without losing momentum.
Focus Management
Success in this role requires the ability to maintain high standards while navigating a workload that changes dynamically. This is not a role for those who prefer a slow, singular focus; it is for those who thrive on variety, pace, and solving complex problems in real-time.

As the Senior Infrastructure Manager, You Will:

People Leadership & Talent Development

Team Management - Lead, mentor, and motivate a team of infrastructure engineers. Conduct weekly 1-2-1s, manage performance reviews, and handle all aspects of people management.
Formal Training & Growth - Go beyond ad-hoc mentoring to schedule and lead formal training sessions regarding operational improvements. Actively create professional development plans for your direct reports.
Recruitment & Retention - Own the hiring process for your team, ensuring we attract top talent and maintain a supportive, inclusive culture.
Culture of Learning - Foster a "Self-Learner" mindset. Create a transparent environment where failures are treated as learning opportunities and documented as such for future reference.

Strategic & Operational Management

Budget & Capacity Planning - Ability to own your team's budget and lead capacity planning initiatives. You will forecast future infrastructure needs to ensure we remain scalable while managing spend for subscriptions and hardware.
Risk & Contingency - Proactively identify operational risks and form contingency plans immediately to ensure business continuity.
Procedure & Frameworks - Ability to define, maintain, and cascade operational procedures (SOPs) and ITIL standards.
Prioritisation - Shield your team from noise by effectively prioritising workloads (Changes, Problems, and Projects) and managing stakeholder expectations.

Technical Support & Oversight

Performance Optimisation - Measure and optimise system performance with a focus on improving reliability and time-to-market. You will drive innovation to get ahead of internal customer needs rather than just reacting to them.
Visual Documentation - Ensure the team produces detailed system design documentation, specifically enforcing the inclusion of visual representations to support understanding. Ability to technologically assess it as a technical editor.
Hybrid Estate Management - Ability to oversee the management of both On-Premise and Cloud (GCP/AWS), ensuring high availability across all environments.
Unblocking Issues - Act as the senior escalation point for complex technical issues. Your goal is not to fix the issue yourself, but to coordinate the right resources and provide air cover.