Lead Infrastructure Operations Engineer

The role Natural Resources Wales is seeking a Lead Infrastructure Operations Engineer to ensure critical ICT services are secure, resilient, and effectively managed. This senior role within Digital, Data and Technology leads the operation, support, and maintenance of physical and virtual infrastructure, ensuring performance, security, and service standards are consistently met, including support for business-critical systems and out-of-hours cover where required.

You will provide technical leadership across live service operations, working with internal teams, service owners, projects, and suppliers to manage priorities, workloads, and service quality. The role involves overseeing incident and problem resolution, ensuring root causes are identified and addressed, and supporting change and service transition by embedding operational readiness, resilience, and support models early in delivery.

You will contribute to service improvement and operational roadmaps, using monitoring tools, service data, and stakeholder feedback to identify risks and opportunities. The role operates across a Microsoft-based environment (Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Defender, AVD), ensuring services are secure, well-documented, and aligned to organisational and ITIL practices.

Responsibilities also include managing third-party suppliers, ensuring contractual and regulatory compliance, and overseeing delegated budgets to deliver value for money. You will lead and support a team of engineers, providing day-to-day technical direction while influencing projects, suppliers, and service improvements. Driving is essential to this role as you will be required to drive to datacentres or remote offices for physical infrastructure maintenance and support therefore you must hold a full and current UK driving license.

As an organisation we support flexible working. You will be contracted to the nearest NRW office to your home and a suitable hybrid working pattern will be agreed on appointment. Any regular face to face meetings or training will be planned in advance.

What you will do:

• Lead the preparation, support, operation, and maintenance of physical and virtual infrastructure in line with organisational standards, service requirements, and KPIs across the product lifecycle.
• Lead and co-ordinate infrastructure operations activities to ensure services meet business needs, performance targets, security requirements, and operational commitments.
• Provide day-to-day technical leadership and direction to infrastructure operations engineers and other technical specialists, managing workload, priorities, capability development, and service quality.
• Maintain secure configuration, accurate information, and effective control of IT assets across one or more infrastructure domains, ensuring compliance with policy and operational standards.
• Oversee infrastructure and application service monitoring, ensuring alerts, incidents, risks, and service issues are responded to appropriately to maintain availability, capacity, and performance.
• Lead and support the investigation of recurring, major, or complex incidents and problems, ensuring root causes are understood and preventive or corrective actions are implemented.
• Manage operational input into projects, programmes, and service changes, ensuring infrastructure requirements, support models, supportability, resilience, and operational readiness are considered from the outset.
• Manage third-party support and service provision in relevant areas, ensuring suppliers meet contractual obligations, service levels, regulatory requirements, and organisational expectations.
• Lead continual service improvement activities by identifying inefficiencies, risks, or service weaknesses and implementing or overseeing optimisation initiatives.
• Ensure operational processes, technical procedures, and support documentation are maintained to an appropriate standard and are fit for effective live service support.
• Engage with users, stakeholders, and service owners to understand operational needs, interpret service data, and drive service improvement and informed decision-making.
• Manage delegated operational budgets and supplier spend in relevant areas, ensuring services are delivered within agreed funding, expenditure is forecast and monitored appropriately, and value for money is achieved.
• Undertake health and safety duties and responsibilities appropriate to the post.
• Be committed to Natural Resources Wales Equal Opportunities and Diversity Policy, together with an understanding of how it operates within the responsibilities of the post.
• Be committed to your own development and that of your staff through the effective use of your personal development plan (known as Sgwrs).
• Required to take part in incident response activities.
• Any other reasonable duties requested commensurate with the grade of this role.

Your qualifications, experience, knowledge and skills:

In your application and interview you will be asked to demonstrate the following skills and experience using the STAR method.

• Strong proficiency in core Azure services, including Virtual Machines, Storage, Virtual Networking, Azure Virtual Desktop, identity-integrated services, and related operational tooling.
• Strong proficiency in enterprise operating system and application deployment and management, including provisioning, patching, configuration management, and lifecycle support.
• Strong proficiency in managing Microsoft 365 services within an enterprise environment.
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, including Conditional Access, MFA, role-based access control, device identity, and access governance principles.
• Experience of monitoring and operational tooling such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Defender portals, with the ability to interpret data and drive action.
• Strong experience using PowerShell and related tooling to automate administration, reporting, remediation, and operational tasks across Microsoft platforms, including Microsoft Graph, Azure CLI, Exchange Online, and related services.
• Good understanding of ITIL service management processes, particularly incident, problem, change, request, asset/configuration, and continual service improvement.
• Experience of leading or mentoring technical staff and co-ordinating operational delivery across internal teams and/or third-party suppliers.
• Experience of supporting infrastructure change, service transition, and operational readiness activities within projects and live service environments.
• IT degree or equivalent industry experience.

Welsh Language level requirements:

Essential: Level A1 - Entry level Welsh language levels. Please note if you do not meet the A1 requirement i.e., ability to understand basic phrases and ability to pronounce Welsh names correctly, then NRW offers a variety of learning options and staff support to help you meet these minimal requirements during the course of your employment with us.

Additional Information:

Due to the nature of the work the successful candidate must be eligible for Security Check (SC) clearance. This generally requires five years' continuous residency in the UK. Further details on eligibility can be found on National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK. Offers will also be subject to a satisfactory Disclosure and Barring Service Check (DBS) check. Natural Resources Wales is unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position. Although we hold a Skilled Worker visa sponsorship licence, it applies only to specific roles that meet both the eligibility criteria and salary requirements set out by the UK Government under the Skilled Worker visa route.

Benefits:

This role will offer a range of benefits, including:

• Civil Service Pension Scheme offering employer contributions of 28.97% (successful internal staff will remain in their current pension scheme).
• 28 days annual leave, rising to 33 days.
• Generous leave entitlements for all your life needs.
• Commitment to professional development.
• Health and wellbeing benefits and support.
• Weekly wellbeing hour to use as you choose.

We're passionate about creating a diverse workforce and positively encourage applications from under-represented communities. We embrace equality of opportunity irrespective of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. We are committed to equal opportunities, and we guarantee interviews for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

We want to attract and retain talented and highly skilled staff, so we make sure that our pay scales remain competitive. We advertise the full pay scale on our job descriptions. Appointed candidates start at the first point of the pay scale and annual increments are paid each year.

We want our staff to grow professionally and personally. From leadership development to access to further and higher education courses, our staff have opportunities to expand their knowledge on a variety of topics, stay current in their field and continue to learn as their career progresses.

We are a Bilingual organisation which complies with the Welsh Language Standards. Welsh language skills are considered an asset to NRW, and we encourage and support staff to learn, develop and use their Welsh language skills.