Demand & Capacity Manager

Your new company

This role is working for Hays, a FTSE 250 recruitment leader with a global footprint, combining decades of expertise with a bold technology strategy focused on modernisation, digitalisation and innovation to power progress through people and market-leading tech. With deep specialism across STEM and digital domains, Hays leverages data-driven insight and a worldwide tech talent network to help organisations secure the skills they need today and for the future. Backed by significant investment in its technology transformation and strategic partnerships, Hays is shaping the future of tech recruitment and supporting businesses as they build tomorrow's workforce.

Your new role

The Demand & Capacity Manager ensures that Technology Operations has the resources, capacity, and performance headroom needed to deliver stable, predictable, and scalable services globally. The role is responsible for forecasting demand, analysing consumption trends, modelling capacity needs, and identifying risks related to saturation, seasonal patterns, and strategic growth. This includes coordinating with Finance, PMO, Service Performance Management, Engineering teams, and vendors to ensure that demand is understood, capacity is planned, and costs are optimised across infrastructure, platforms, cloud, and global operations.

Core Responsibilities:

• Own the global demand and capacity management framework across infrastructure, cloud, platforms, and operational delivery services.
• Develop and maintain capacity models incorporating historic trends, business forecasts, and technology growth patterns.
• Forecast demand for infrastructure resources, cloud consumption, platform usage, licensing, storage, workloads, and workforce/operational capacity.
• Identify saturation risks, constraints, seasonal spikes, and capacity-related service vulnerabilities.
• Provide capacity insights to PMO reprioritisation, investment planning, and readiness assessments.
• Work with Service Performance Manager to correlate capacity with stability, recurrence patterns, and performance bottlenecks.
• Partner with Vendor/Contract Manager to assess vendor capacity commitments, delivery models, and scalability.
• Collaborate with EA to ensure capacity plans align with technology roadmaps and transformation initiatives.
• Ensure appropriate capacity for major business events, releases, migrations, and peak periods.
• Maintain regular reporting covering consumption, forecasts, risks, and recommended actions.
• Accountable for the accuracy and quality of global demand and capacity forecasts.
• Ensure capacity risks are identified early, documented, communicated, and mitigated with clear action plans.
• Maintain a single source of truth for demand, consumption, and capacity insights.
• Provide leadership with proactive recommendations for investment, optimisation, and scaling actions.
• Drive alignment between capacity planning, financial forecasting, and platform/infrastructure strategies.
• Prepare and run capacity governance routines including monthly capacity reviews.
• Ensure readiness and capacity availability for major business or technology events.
• Support cloud optimisation and FinOps activities with accurate consumption modelling.
• Collaborate with operational teams to ensure capacity actions support service stability and avoid degradations.

Global Delivery & Collaboration:

• Work with Regional Service Managers to capture local demand patterns, constraints, and capacity needs.
• Collaborate with EA to ensure strategic alignment with long-term architectural evolution.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Platform teams to understand scaling limits, performance boundaries, and capacity signals.
• Engage with PMO to validate capacity readiness for projects, migrations, and releases.
• Coordinate globally with MSPs (incl. Cognizant) to validate vendor capacity and delivery throughput.
• Work with Finance and Cost Management teams to validate budget impact, cost-to-serve models, and cloud consumption forecasts.
• Support Security and Compliance capacity requirements for logging, monitoring, DR, and backup workloads.

Key Deliverable:

• Global Demand & Capacity Forecast (rolling 12-36 months).
• Capacity Models & Dashboards (infrastructure, cloud, platform, operational workload).
• Monthly Consumption & Capacity Report including risks, hotspots, and future projections.
• Quarterly Capacity Review Pack including investment proposals and optimisation insights.
• Capacity inputs for PMO readiness assessments, budgeting, and prioritisation.
• Documentation of mitigation actions for capacity-related risks.
• Cloud consumption models and cost-optimisation recommendations.

KPIs & Success Measures:

• Accuracy of demand and capacity forecasts.
• Reduction of unplanned capacity-related incidents or outages.
• Timeliness of capacity reporting and insights.
• Optimisation impact (cloud savings, resource efficiency gains).
• Stakeholder satisfaction across Technology, Finance, Regions, and Vendors.
• Alignment of capacity with business demand and technology roadmaps.

What you'll need to succeed

• Hands-on experience with automation platforms (ServiceNow Flow Designer, Power Automate, Rundeck, Ansible, Terraform, or similar).
• Scripting skills (PowerShell, Python, Bash, or equivalent).
• Understanding of monitoring and alerting systems (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, Azure Monitor).
• Knowledge of ITSM processes (Incident, Problem, Change, Request) and workflow automation.
• Experience integrating automation with CI/CD, APIs, and cloud-native services.
• Strong understanding of identity models, RBAC, and secure automation practices.
• Ability to address nonrepresentational issues and translate them into automation solutions.
• Experience working with MSPs and global delivery models.

What you'll get in return

Competitive base salary + bonus + benefits aligned to the seniority of the role.

If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now. If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.