Operational Infrastructure Manager

Location: London/Hybrid (3-4 days typically)

Type: Full time - Permanent

Client: Specialty Insurance Broker

Role Purpose

You will lead the day-to-day running of our entire infrastructure estate including cloud, on-prem, network, identity, backup, DR, and security platforms. Your job is to keep everything stable, secure, resilient, cost-efficient, and continually improving. This is a hands-on operations leadership role with real ownership: you'll run the operational infrastructure function like a managed service provider, drive down risk and technical debt, resolve escalations, and ensure the estate is always moving forward. Reporting to the IT Director with a dotted line to the Head of IT Infrastructure who will have overall responsibility for infrastructure strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Operations
  • Own the daily performance, stability, and reliability of all infrastructure services (Azure, on-prem, networks, identity, backup, DR, security).
  • Ensure platforms are monitored, patched, supported, and healthy.
  • Maintain an accurate CMDB and ensure operational processes and documentation are kept up to date.
  • Participate in out-of-hours work when required to minimise business disruption.
• Resilience, Risk & Technical Debt
  • Own and maintain infrastructure-related risk items, driving remediation to completion.
  • Reduce vulnerabilities, end-of-life systems, legacy dependencies, and unmonitored assets.
  • Lead disaster recovery readiness, including runbooks, testing, failover/failback, and alignment with business continuity requirements.
  • Act as the senior escalation point for infrastructure-related issues.
  • Identify true root cause and implement robust, repeatable fixes.
  • Produce or update KB articles and ensure teams are trained on new processes.
  • Improve service flows and prevent repeat issues.
  • Work closely with an outsourced support team and external vendors.
  • Run operational service reviews, track performance, and hold partners to account on SLAs.
  • Ensure consistent delivery standards and aligned ways of working across internal and external teams.
• Projects & Continuous Improvement
  • Plan and deliver infrastructure changes and operational improvement projects (migrations, upgrades, tooling rollout, hardware refresh, etc.).
  • Manage resource planning across BAU and project workloads.
  • Look for ways to automate, simplify, and improve operational processes.
• Standards, Governance & Collaboration
  • Enforce strong engineering and operational standards across infrastructure.
  • Ensure compliance with security, governance, and regulatory expectations.
  • Work closely with Infrastructure, Cyber, Applications, and Architecture teams to align operations with overall IT strategy.
  • Represent infrastructure within technical forums and change governance processes.
  • Directly manage a small team of infrastructure engineers (Portugal-based), developing capability through coaching, mentoring, and cross-training.
  • Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and proactive engineering.

Skills & Experience

• 5+ years leading IT infrastructure operations in a hybrid-cloud environment.
• Experience managing operational teams (internal, offshore, or outsourced).
• Strong understanding of cloud, on-prem, and network technologies.
• Proven track record reducing risk, improving stability, and eliminating technical debt.
• Experience in DR planning and resilience engineering.
• Able to translate complex technical detail into clear, business-friendly communication.
• Confident stakeholder manager; able to influence at all levels.
• Solid planning and delivery skills across both BAU and project work.
• Familiarity with ITIL processes (Incident, Problem, Change).

Technical Strengths (desired)

• Azure IaaS/PaaS, AVD, SQL, Storage, Backup, Active Directory/Entra ID, Conditional Access, RBAC, firewalls (Fortinet), networking (Meraki/Cisco), VPN, Office 365, Mimecast, Rubrik/Acronis, monitoring platforms, automation, network segmentation, and ITOM/CMDB tooling.

Further Perks Of Working With Us (Fixed Benefits)

• Employer pension contribution of 10% (providing you, the Employee provides 5%).
• Good work life balance - flexibility to suit you.
• Life Assurance at X4 of your base salary.
• Group Income Protection.
• Generous Annual Leave entitlement.
• Private Medical Insurance.

We truly value the diversity of our teams and as a Group, we are committed to supporting and welcoming individuals from all backgrounds, as we appreciate every perspective is a significant part of our success. Should you require any reasonable adjustment throughout the recruitment process, please do not hesitate to let a member of the Talent team know.