Engineering Team Leader in London

A hands-on technical team lead role, delivering BAU engineering, technical change, project work, and operational improvements. This role is expected to combine practical engineering delivery with day-to-day team leadership, work prioritisation, stakeholder engagement, contract and vendor management, and ownership of key operational processes.

The successful candidate will remain technically active across infrastructure platforms, supporting complex troubleshooting, implementation activity, maintenance, lifecycle management, automation, and project delivery, while also guiding and coordinating a mixed team of engineers across Windows, Linux, Communications, Desktop, cloud, and related infrastructure services.

• Act as a hands-on engineering lead, actively participating in BAU technical work, troubleshooting, implementation tasks, maintenance activities, and project delivery rather than operating solely in a supervisory capacity.
• Work directly alongside infrastructure engineers on day-to-day technical tasks and projects, providing practical technical input, removing blockers, reviewing approaches, and helping ensure work is completed to a high standard.
• Take ownership of selected engineering deliverables, including design input, configuration, testing, documentation, implementation, handover, and post-implementation support.
• Support BAU infrastructure operations, including incident support, service requests, problem management, platform maintenance, patching, capacity reviews, monitoring improvements, and operational resilience activities.
• Act as a buffer for incoming work, triaging and prioritising requests, assigning tasks effectively, balancing workloads, and protecting engineering time while ensuring urgent business priorities are addressed.
• Lead, support, mentor, and guide team members through regular check-ins, coaching, technical oversight, constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and practical development planning.
• Coordinate project activity across the team, helping define tasks, track progress, manage risks and dependencies, escalate issues early, and ensure delivery remains aligned with Technology and business priorities.
• Oversee and maintain contracts and licences, including renewals, co-terming opportunities, cost optimisation, usage reviews, vendor engagement, and ensuring the team understands the value, cost, and operational benefit of key services.
• Manage datacentre and infrastructure operational processes, including hardware lifecycle, goods in/out processes, access requests, intelligent hands support, asset tracking, and coordination with suppliers and internal teams.
• Own lifecycle management of operating systems, platforms, and infrastructure-managed applications, ensuring patching, upgrades, end-of-life planning, security remediation, and stakeholder communication are managed proactively.
• Identify and remediate technical obsolescence and recurring issues, driving fix-at-source improvements that reduce operational noise, improve reliability, and strengthen service resilience.
• Maintain strong stakeholder and vendor relationships, providing clear communication, practical guidance, progress updates, and timely escalation where required.
• Champion automation, standardisation, and a DevOps mindset by reducing manual effort, improving repeatability, encouraging shared ownership, and promoting modern engineering practices across the team.
• Continuously improve operational processes and documentation, ensuring procedures, support models, handover material, and Service Delivery guidance remain accurate, practical, and effective.
• Contribute to infrastructure budgeting and cost control by providing technical input, usage analysis, renewal recommendations, and cost-conscious options for future investment.

• + years of hands-on experience in IT infrastructure engineering roles, with strong practical knowledge across operating systems, virtualisation, storage, networking, cloud, endpoint, and collaboration platforms.
• At least 2 years of experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating technical engineers while remaining actively involved in engineering delivery.
• Strong hands-on capability in troubleshooting, implementation, maintenance, patching, lifecycle management, and operational support across enterprise infrastructure environments.
• Proven ability to balance leadership responsibilities with direct technical delivery, BAU support, project work, and stakeholder management.
• Experience managing or supporting supplier relationships, contract renewals, licence usage reviews, cost optimisation, and vendor performance discussions.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain technical issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong problem-solving, incident management, prioritisation, and decision-making abilities in a fast-paced operational environment.
• Strong knowledge of server, network, storage, virtualisation, monitoring, backup, endpoint, and cloud technologies.
• Understanding of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, scripting, automation, and configuration management tools such as PowerShell, Terraform, Ansible, Git, SCCM, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, service management, and operational tooling such as SolarWinds, PagerDuty, or equivalent platforms.
• Exposure to multiple infrastructure domains, ideally including Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, AWS, Citrix, SAN, VMware, Linux, Windows Server, desktop engineering, or Cisco Unified Communications.
• Experience improving ways of working, challenging inefficient processes, and introducing practical automation or standardisation to reduce manual effort.
• Customer-focused, delivery-focused, and comfortable taking ownership of issues from initial investigation through to resolution and handover.
• Experience supporting cyber security controls, infrastructure resilience, patch compliance, and risk remediation activities would be beneficial.

• Any management or project management qualifications, alongside technical qualifications, including Microsoft, Linux, VMware, Citrix, or Cloud accreditation would be beneficial.