Infrastructure Reliability Engineering, Senior Manager in London

The London Metal Exchange is the world centre for industrial metals trading. Most of the world's global non-ferrous futures business is conducted on the LME's three trading platforms totalling $18 trillion, 178 million lots and 4 billion tonnes with a market open interest high of 1.8 million lots in 2024. All trades are cleared and settled by LME Clear.

Overall Purpose of Role

This role is accountable for initially establishing then maturing a best of breed Infrastructure Reliability Engineering (IRE) function, embedding reliability engineering as a core discipline across the technology lifecycle, from design through live operation, in support of trading critical and regulatory significant services. To provide senior leadership across Infrastructure Reliability Engineering, accountable for the resilience, availability, and operational readiness of the LME Group technology estate. Lead the design and delivery of complex infrastructure transformation, platform modernisation, and re‐architecture initiatives, ensuring secure, compliant, and highly reliable services that support trading critical operations and regulatory obligations.

Responsibilities

• Establish, mature, and continuously evolve the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering function, defining the IRE operating model, engagement patterns, and service boundaries across infrastructure, architecture, operations, security, and application teams.
• Set, maintain, and enforce consistent reliability engineering standards, patterns, and tooling across the infrastructure estate, balancing resilience, regulatory assurance, and operational efficiency.
• Act as senior Infrastructure Reliability Engineering SME across major programmes end‐to‐end (discovery, dependency mapping, design, planning, build, cutover, fall‐back), with direct accountability for service stability and risk reduction for trading‐critical platforms.
• Drive a proactive reliability and failure engineering culture, including structured risk identification, resilience testing, failover validation, and scenario based exercises for trading critical and systemically important services.
• Act as the accountable owner for Infrastructure Operational Readiness, ensuring platforms and services do not transition into live operation without meeting mandated readiness, observability, recoverability, and supportability criteria.
• Define and embed a consistent reliability measurement framework across infrastructure platforms, including service level indicators, objectives, and leading indicators of operational risk, enabling data driven prioritisation and informed investment decisions.
• Build, lead, and develop a high performing Infrastructure Reliability Engineering team, defining clear role expectations, capability standards, and development pathways.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, shared ownership, and continuous improvement, ensuring operational knowledge and resilience capability are institutionalised and not dependent on individuals.
• Act as a senior authority on infrastructure resilience and operational risk, influencing strategic decisions, architectural direction, and investment priorities to ensure reliability is designed in, not retrofitted.
• Own measurable infrastructure reliability outcomes, including availability, resilience, recovery performance, and operational risk reduction, with regular executive level reporting against agreed targets.
• Own and enforce reliability governance, including stage gates, design authorities, risk and issue management, CAB/change control, and auditable documentation aligned to ITSM, IBS, and regulatory expectations.
• Lead platform modernisation and resilience engineering initiatives, including containerisation and cloud‐adjacent platforms (e.g. Kubernetes, OpenShift), working closely with Architecture, InfoSec, and application teams to embed reliability, security, and observability by design.
• Define and drive the LME Infrastructure Reliability posture, including fault tolerance, redundancy, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failover strategies across on‐prem and hybrid environments.
• Lead senior‐level technical discovery and design workshops to shape scope, delivery approach, and resourcing for reliability‐critical initiatives, ensuring alignment with IOE priorities and business outcomes.
• Establish and assure Operational Readiness (ORR) standards: runbooks, monitoring and alerting, SLIs/SLOs, performance and capacity baselines, service transition, and operational handover.
• Ensure infrastructure platforms meet security and compliance requirements (e.g. CIS, ISO 27001, NIST), covering identity and access management, encryption, auditability, and regulatory evidence.
• Engage at senior stakeholder level across Technology and the business, providing clear communication on delivery status, operational risk, dependencies, cost forecasts, and resource demand.

Academic and Professional Qualifications Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrable track record of continuous professional development in infrastructure, solutions engineering, or technology transformation.

Required Knowledge and Level of Experience

• 10+ years of experience leading large-scale Infrastructure or Reliability Engineering functions, with demonstrable accountability for the availability, resilience, and operational performance of mission‐critical systems.
• Proven experience establishing, scaling, or materially maturing an Infrastructure Reliability, Platform Reliability, or equivalent function within a complex, regulated, or high‐availability environment.
• Significant experience operating in regulated or high‐assurance environments (e.g. financial services, exchanges, clearing, or equivalent).
• Experience influencing senior leadership and steering complex transformation initiatives across multiple technology domains.
• Significant experience leading or assuring large‐scale, enterprise Linux estates (e.g. RHEL‐based), including responsibility for reliability, resilience, and operational risk in regulated or high‐availability environments.

Skills set and Core Competencies Required for the Role

• Deep expertise in infrastructure reliability engineering, resilience patterns, and operational risk management.
• Strong governance, assurance, and regulatory mindset.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and senior communication skills.
• Ability to lead multi‐disciplinary technical teams through complex change.
• Data‐driven approach to reliability, performance, and continuous improvement.
• Reliability engineering, resilience patterns, and operational risk management.
• Governance, assurance, and regulatory mindset.
• Data‐driven analysis and decision-making.
• Senior stakeholder influence and technical authority.
• Team leadership and capability development.

Technical Skills – Infrastructure Reliability Engineering

• Enterprise Linux / RHEL mastery.
• Linux reliability, performance, and capacity engineering.
• Automation, standardised builds, configuration management.
• Observability, diagnostics, and root‐cause analysis.
• Linux host reliability for container / OpenShift platforms.
• Linux security, hardening, and compliance.
• Linux‐level failure engineering and resilience patterns.
• Senior Linux technical authority.

Personal Qualities

• High integrity, ownership, and accountability in all aspects of work.
• Structured, pragmatic, and calm under pressure. Able to manage competing priorities and deliver in high‐stakes environments.
• Collaborative and inclusive, building strong cross‐functional relationships and fostering a culture of open communication.
• Curious and improvement‐oriented, always seeking to challenge the status quo and drive innovation with data‐driven insights.
• Adaptable and resilient, able to navigate ambiguity and lead teams through complex change.
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, respecting and valuing the unique contributions of all colleagues.
• Comfortable holding the line on operational risk and readiness in high‐pressure, time‐sensitive delivery environments.

The LME is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. In recruiting for our teams, we welcome the unique contributions that you can bring in terms of education, ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity, expression and reassignment, nation of origin, age, languages spoken, colour, religion, disability, sexual orientation and beliefs. In doing so, we want every LME employee to feel our commitment to showing respect for all and encouraging open collaboration and communication.