Head of Infrastructure in City of Westminster

Why we’re hiring

The Head of Infrastructure, Data & Technology Solutions will establish and coordinate the infrastructure standards, operating model, governance, and cross‑cutting platform capabilities required to run DTS products securely, reliably and consistently.

In this federated model, specialist product and platform teams build, deploy and operate their own environments while the Head of Infrastructure ensures they operate within agreed standards for reliability, observability, security, deployment control, cost visibility, operational readiness and resilience.

The role collaborates closely with the CTO, Chief Architect, SVP Data Collaboration Infrastructure, SVP Security and Compliance, Tech Ops, Engineering, Product, Enterprise Technology and other DTS leaders.

• What you’ll be doing
• Infrastructure standards and operating model
• Define and maintain common infrastructure standards.
• Establish standards for reliability, observability, deployment governance, security, resilience, cost visibility and operational readiness.
• Ensure standards are practical and adoptable by diverse platform teams.
• Align standards with DTS architecture, security, product and commercial priorities.
• Federated infrastructure governance
• Coordinate a federated infrastructure model across DTS.
• Enable platform teams to operate autonomously while meeting common requirements.
• Define where common tooling or central coordination is required.
• Monitor adherence to standards and provide visibility to leadership.
• Alignment with DTS leadership
• Translate architecture and security principles into practical infrastructure standards.
• Resolve trade‑offs between autonomy, standardisation, cost, security and reliability.
• Provide leadership with visibility of infrastructure risks, gaps and progress.
• Deployment governance and change visibility
• Define minimum standards for production deployment processes.
• Establish centralized visibility of deployments.
• Support release gates, change records and deployment auditability.
• Observability, monitoring and operational visibility
• Define common observability and monitoring expectations.
• Establish standards for logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and dashboards.
• Enable cross‑platform visibility for incidents and performance issues.
• Reliability, resilience and operational readiness
• Define standards for SLIs, SLA, recovery, incident readiness and operational maturity.
• Support disaster recovery, business continuity and operational readiness requirements.
• Ensure teams have runbooks, escalation paths and incident response processes.
• Infrastructure security alignment
• Ensure infrastructure standards reflect security requirements around access control, network exposure, secrets and hardening.
• Work with Security and Compliance to provide evidence of required controls.
• Cost visibility and capacity oversight
• Define standards for cloud cost reporting and allocation.
• Report infrastructure cost by product, platform, client or workload.
• Identify and reduce duplication and waste.
• Relationship with Tech Ops
• Partner to ensure practical delivery workflows.
• Identify recurring operational issues and improvement opportunities.
• Common tooling and shared platform capabilities
• Identify and coordinate shared tooling for governance, observability, incident management, cost reporting and more.
• Ensure central capabilities allow autonomy while providing DTS‑wide visibility.

Qualifications

• Multiple years of leadership experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, Dev Ops or technology operations.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms, deployment models, observability, reliability and operational resilience.
• Experience working in federated or matrixed technology organisations.
• Ability to define standards and operating models without over‑centralising delivery.
• Deep knowledge of CI/CD, deployment governance, incident management, monitoring, logging and production operations.
• Proficiency in infrastructure security, access control, network exposure, cloud posture and operational risk.
• Influential communication and stakeholder management across Engineering, Architecture, Security, Product, Tech Ops and Enterprise Technology.
• Balance autonomy, consistency, security, reliability and delivery speed.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to author practical standards.
• Leadership expectations
• Act as a coordinator and enabler, not a central blocker.
• Respect the autonomy of specialist teams.
• Create clarity around infrastructure standards and expectations.
• Build trust with Tech Ops, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security and Product teams.
• Challenge teams where practices create risk or operational weakness.
• Provide clear reporting on infrastructure health, cost, reliability and operational readiness.
• Success measures
• DTS teams have clear and adopted infrastructure standards.
• Product and platform teams operate autonomously while meeting common expectations.
• Improved visibility of deployments and production changes.
• Enhanced observability and monitoring across DTS platforms.
• Clear ownership and accountability for infrastructure operations.
• Reduced infrastructure fragmentation that creates risk.
• Improved infrastructure cost transparency.
• Strengthened alignment across Infrastructure, Tech Ops, Security, Architecture and Engineering.
• Leadership confident in the reliability, visibility and governability of DTS infrastructure.
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