Chapter Director, Infrastructure Engineering

This position will be responsible for leading and managing a collaborative, cross-functional group of infrastructure engineering professionals within a centralized IT organization. The role is critical for ensuring the optimal design, implementation, and design to operate principles for infrastructure engineering across cloud, data center, end user and data network domains. The Director will foster innovation, knowledge-sharing, and the continuous improvement of infrastructure engineering standards and best practices. This position requires strategic leadership, technical expertise, and the ability to align infrastructure engineering capabilities with the broader organizational goals, ensuring the reliability, safety and security of critical and enterprise systems.Key responsibilities will include:

Establishing the right standards

• Define expected practices & guardrails and chapter member technical output based on industry best practices

• Integrate standards and frameworks from partners in Enterprise Architecture, compliance and information security

• Adapt practices to fit maturity level and strategic objectives

• Ensure that infrastructure engineering aligns with National Grid’s future state blueprint and road map.

Develop the right skills:

• Collaborate with Platform Leaders and Owners to understand their specific capability and certification requirements

• Map expected competencies & certifications against each role & level in the Chapter

• Design career path including performance expectations and promotion criteria

• Partner with Learning and Development teams to design targeted training & certification curriculum

Deliver the right capacity:

• Track supply of and aggregate demand for Chapter resources

• Collaborate with executive leadership to ensure Chapter members are allocated to the most impactful Teams unlocking business value, orchestrating spikes where warranted

• Collaborate with other Chapter Leads to facilitate career moves across Chapters for career growth & cross-training

• Facilitate and manage workforce supply / demand approach based on strong collaboration with Platform Leads and Owners

• Develop a recruiting strategy for Chapter members and participate in recruiting process by making final hiring recommendations

Manage / deliver for internal and external stakeholders:

• Demonstrate subject matter expertise in all areas of development and innovation in Chapter domain, both internally and externally

• Ensure Platform Leads and other stakeholders know what resources and knowledge are available to them

• Identify and define Chapter OKRs, by also collaborating, with Platform Leads to ensure alignment to overall goals

• Collaborate with executive leadership to ensure Chapter members are allocated to the most impactful Teams unlocking business value, orchestrating expansion and contraction based on prioritization

Infrastructure Engineering Focus:

• Facilitate collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and best practice adoption across the infrastructure engineering community

• Establish and promote frameworks and guidelines for the standardization of infrastructure architecture, design principles, and operational procedures.

• Organize workshops, seminars, and training programs to upskill infrastructure engineering teams and keep them current on emerging trends.

• Experience in leading cross-functional infrastructure engineering teams, with a strong focus on cloud, data center, end-user, and data network domains, as well as expertise in establishing engineering standards, developing team skills, and driving continuous improvement in infrastructure practices.

• Proven analytical skills and experience making decisions based on hard and soft data

• Experience with resource planning and allocation within and across organizations

• Ability to collaborate with colleagues and suppliers in different time zones and communicate effectively with both technical and business stakeholders

• Depth and breadth across the infrastructure engineering domains, for example: cloud & data center (hyperconverged and converged technologies, file and block storage, backup technologies including long term retention, data archiving, virtual and physical environment management, public/private cloud services) data networking (routing, switching, wired and wireless protocols and design) and end user (device and operating systems management, collaboration and identity systems).

• Expertise in x86 and AIX Operating systems

• Advantageous to have had exposure to cyber resilience solutions, including immutable backup and building recoverable solutions

• Knowledge of micro segmentation across both physical and virtual environments

• Experience with ServiceNow in configuring workflows, and integrating with other systems

• Skills in automating infrastructure using Terraform, VMware Aria automation, PowerShell, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

• Experience working in Agile methodologies – SAFE, Scrum, Kanban, etc

A competitive salary between £85,000 – £105,000 – dependent on capability

As well as your base salary, you will receive a company car or allowance, a bonus of up to 20% of your salary for stretch performance and a competitive contributory pension scheme where we will double match your contribution to a maximum company contribution of 12%. You will also have access to a number of flexible benefits such as a share incentive plan, a salary sacrifice technology scheme, support via the employee assistance line and matched charity giving to name a few.