Infrastructure Lead (Network & Systems)

About the Role We are looking for an Infrastructure Lead to own the day-to-day health, performance, and evolution of a customer's network and systems estate under along-term managed services contract. You will be the senior technical authority on the account — leading a team of engineers through incidents, problems, and changes, acting as the customer's trusted technical point of contact, and turning operational insight into architecture recommendations that support their modernisation roadmap. This is a customer-facing delivery leadership role, not a back-office engineering role. You will pair hands-on technical depth with the confidence to run service reviews, manage escalations, and represent our technical credibility to customer IT leadership. What You'll Do Run theservice ▪ Act as escalation point and technical lead for major incidents; drive root-causeanalysis through to permanent fix. ▪ Review, risk-assess, and approve change requests before they go to the customer'sChange Advisory Board. ▪ Own contracted SLAs (availability, MTTR, MTTD, change success rate) and drive corrective action when targets are at risk. ▪ Keep capacity forecasts, patching/firmware currency, and hardware/software end-of-life tracking current across the estate. ▪ MaintainHLD/LLD, SOPs, diagrams, and knowledge-base articles to an audit-ready standard. Shape the architecture ▪ Provide technical design authority for infrastructure changes, refresh cycles, and small-to-medium projects. ▪ Enforce configuration standards, security baselines, and documentation conventions. ▪ Identify modernisation opportunities — SD-WAN/SASE, hyperconverged infrastructure, ZeroTrust access, automation — and turn them into proposals the customer can acton. Lead the team ▪ Lead, mentor, and performance-manage a team of L1–L3 network and/or systems engineers, including 24x7 or on-call rostering where the account requires it. ▪ Own skills development — training plans, certification pathways, and knowledge-sharing. ▪ Interview and help select engineers joining the account team. Own the customer relationship ▪ Bethe primary senior technical contact for the customer's IT stakeholders on operational matters. ▪ Lead operational service reviews and contribute technical content to QuarterlyBusiness Reviews. ▪ ManageOEM, vendor, and carrier escalations through to resolution. Keep it compliant and improving ▪ Ensure changes and configurations stay compliant with customer security policy, contractual obligations, and regulatory requirements; maintain accurate CMDBand asset records and support audits. ▪ Automate repetitive work — provisioning, config backup, health checks, patching. ▪ ChampionAI-assisted monitoring and observability (anomaly detection, predictive alerting, noise reduction) to shift the account from reactive to proactive operations. What You'll Bring ▪ 8–15years of hands-on network, systems/infrastructure, or combined infrastructure engineering experience in managed services, outsourced IT, or large enterpriseIT operations. ▪ At least 2–3 years as a team lead, senior/principal engineer, or technical escalation lead with responsibility for other engineers. ▪ Proven ownership of production infrastructure under SLA, with fluency in ITIL-aligned incident, problem, and change management. ▪ Direct experience working with an end-user customer in a managed services model, including running operational service reviews. ▪ Degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or equivalent demonstrable experience. Technical Skills We're Looking For Strong in one domain, competent in the other (hybrid track), or strong across yourfull domain (specialist track). Network ▪ WAN and SD-WAN (MPLS, Cisco Viptela/Meraki, VMware VeloCloud, Cato, Fortinet, ArubaEdgeConnect); LAN switching (Cisco Catalyst/Nexus, Aruba, Juniper); WLAN(Cisco/Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, RF and site survey). ▪ Firewall/NGFW(Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point, Cisco ASA/FTD), IPS/IDS, NAC (Cisco ISE,Aruba ClearPass), RADIUS/TACACS+, SSO/MFA, PKI. ▪ DNS/DHCP/IPAM(Infoblox, Microsoft, BIND); monitoring and config management (SolarWinds,PRTG, Zabbix, NetBrain). ▪ Niceto have: SASE/SSE (Cato, Zscaler, Netskope), ZTNA, SD-WAN-to-SASE migration. Systems /Infrastructure ▪ Compute(Dell, HPE, Lenovo) and virtualisation (VMware vSphere/vCenter/NSX, NutanixAHV/Prism, Hyper-V); hyperconverged infrastructure (Nutanix, vSAN). ▪ WindowsServer and RHEL/Ubuntu hardening and patching; backup and DR (Veeam, Commvault,Zerto). ▪ Storage— SAN/NAS (Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, HPE), FC/iSCSI storage networking. ▪ Nice to have: Infrastructure-as-Code and automation (Ansible, Terraform,PowerShell/Python), AIOps-enabled monitoring. ▪ Both tracks: ITSM tooling — ServiceNow or Remedy. Certifications ▪ Required:ITIL Foundation (v3 or v4). ▪ Network track: CCNP or CCIE (Enterprise, Security, or R&S), Fortinet NSE 4–7, PaloAlto PCNSE, Aruba ACMP/ACDX; Infoblox design certification an advantage. ▪ Systems track: VMware VCP-DCV, Nutanix NCP-MCI/NCA, Microsoft Windows Server/HybridInfrastructure; RHCSA an advantage. ▪ Advantageous:ITIL Practitioner or Managing Professional, AWS/Azure/GCP associate-level, arecognised SASE/SSE or automation credential (Cato, Zscaler, Red Hat Ansible).