3rd Line Team Leader in London

Working from an MSP in Cardiff, responsible for supervision of the 3rd line service desk team that provides IT Infrastructure and Security support to clients across the UK and Ireland. This is a technically hands-on role, acting as point of escalation for the team as well as responsible for maintaining SLA and contractual commitments and team leadership.

The 3rd Line Team Leader is responsible for the leadership, technical direction, performance, and continual improvement of the 3rd Line Infrastructure and Security function. This role combines advanced technical expertise with operational leadership, ensuring the delivery of secure, resilient, and high-performing IT services across customer and internal environments.

The successful candidate will possess significant hands-on experience across infrastructure, networking, cloud, endpoint management, and cybersecurity technologies. They will have experience operating within complex IT support environments and will be capable of leading from the front during major incidents, security incidents, escalations, and technical transformations.

The role is accountable for managing team workload, setting daily and weekly priorities, improving service performance, developing technical capability within the team, and driving operational excellence through ITIL best practice. The individual will also be responsible for producing and presenting meaningful operational and service performance reporting, turning data and insights into actionable improvement plans for customers and internal stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership & People Management: Lead, mentor and develop the 3rd Line Engineering team. Set daily, weekly and monthly priorities aligned to business objectives. Manage resource allocation and workload balancing across customer environments. Conduct performance reviews, coaching sessions and personal development planning. Create a culture of accountability, ownership and technical excellence. Promote knowledge sharing and continuous learning across the function. Support recruitment, onboarding and succession planning activities.
• Technical Leadership: Act as the senior escalation point for complex infrastructure, security, networking and cloud issues. Provide technical leadership during Major Incidents, Problem Management activities and security events. Drive root cause analysis and ensure lessons learned are implemented. Review technical designs and infrastructure changes to ensure alignment with best practice. Hands-on management of complex tickets and ensuring continuous learning within the team.
• Infrastructure Management: Provide technical leadership and governance across various platforms including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Intune, Windows Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, Active Directory, and more.
• Security & Compliance: Maintain oversight of security operations across customer environments. Ensure vulnerabilities are identified, prioritised and remediated. Lead security incident investigations and coordinate responses. Monitor security trends and emerging threats.
• Service Management & ITIL Governance: Operate in accordance with ITIL and ITSM best practice. Own and improve L3 Incident Management processes. Shift left drive to L2, ensuring L2 teams have the skills, tools and access required to resolve incidents without the need for L3 or Architect intervention.
• Reporting & Data Analytics: Produce weekly and monthly operational and service performance reports. Analyse infrastructure, security and service performance trends and provide insights.

Key Performance Indicators include SLA achievement, incident resolution performance, major incident reduction, vulnerability remediation compliance, patch compliance levels, service availability, customer satisfaction, team productivity and utilisation.

Essential Knowledge, Skills & Experience:

• Proven experience leading senior technical teams within an MSP, Managed Service or Enterprise IT environment.
• Minimum 7 years' experience in infrastructure, networking and security environments.
• Strong experience supporting Microsoft Azure environments.
• Expert knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Intune, Windows Defender, Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Windows Server, Networking technologies, Firewalls, Endpoint Security, RMM platforms, MDM technologies.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills & Experience:

• Microsoft Azure certifications.
• ITIL Foundation or higher.
• Experience in retail, hospitality or multi-site IT environments.

Behavioural Competencies include leading by example, demonstrating accountability, being calm and decisive under pressure, and being customer focused.

The successful candidate will demonstrate commitment to delivering on commitments to customers and colleagues, creating an environment where people can become the best they can be, and continuously improving services and capabilities.

Suggested salary band: £50,000 - £60,000 + benefits (depending on experience and security expertise).