Senior Manager, Infrastructure & Operations in Newcastle upon Tyne

We are looking for a Senior Infrastructure Manager who is, first and foremost, a people leader. In this role, your primary responsibility is the health, performance, and career growth of your engineering team. While you must possess a solid technical background to understand the challenges your team faces, your day‑to‑day focus will not be hands‑on technical work. Instead, you will use your experience to remove blockers, guide decision‑making, and ensure your engineers have the environment they need to succeed. You will act as the bridge between technical execution and business strategy, team budget management, defining roadmaps, and ensuring operational excellence across a complex hybrid (predominantly on‑prem and some cloud) estate.

The Team You Will Lead: You will lead the Infrastructure Solutions team within the wider Technical Operations department. Your engineers are responsible for building the environment, delivering projects as requested by Engineering and Product, and ensuring we remain available, scalable, and secure. They are not responsible for the BAU function of the platforms that is managed by another team within Technical Operations. The Infrastructure Solutions team takes a concept or idea and makes that into a reality within the boundaries and constraints of our platforms.

You will be managing a team of engineers who individually possess experience in:

• On‑Premise Linux systems, Container solutions, Debian packaging, Ansible, data streaming and queuing technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Advanced database management knowledge (MySQL, Postgres) in replicated environments.
• Physical Network management, with an on‑prem estate that is Juniper focused.
• Cloud environments: GCP and AWS
• Platform engineer focused on building, maintaining and supporting an Internal Developer Platform (CI/CD)

The Operational Reality: It is important to be transparent about the environment you are joining. We operate at high velocity with a broad and complex technology estate. However, we are a lean team, not a giant corporation with endless resources.

Context Switching is the Norm: You will rarely have the luxury of focusing on a single task for weeks at a time. You will be required to shift focus multiple times a week, and sometimes multiple times a day, as business priorities evolve.

Agility over Silos: Because we are a lean team, we wear many hats. You must be comfortable pivoting from a strategic discussion to an operational challenge without losing momentum.

Focus Management: Success in this role requires the ability to maintain high standards while navigating a workload that changes dynamically. This is not a role for those who prefer a slow, singular focus; it is for those who thrive on variety, pace, and solving complex problems in real‑time.

As the Senior Infrastructure Manager, You Will:

• Team Management: Lead, mentor, and motivate a team of infrastructure engineers. Conduct weekly 1‑2‑1s, manage performance reviews, and handle all aspects of people management.
• Formal Training & Growth: Go beyond ad‑hoc mentoring to schedule and lead formal training sessions regarding operational improvements. Actively create professional development plans for your direct reports.
• Recruitment & Retention: Own the hiring process for your team, ensuring we attract top talent and maintain a supportive, inclusive culture.
• Culture of Learning: Foster a "Self‑Learner" mindset. Create a transparent environment where failures are treated as learning opportunities and documented as such for future reference.

Strategic & Operational Management:

• Budget & Capacity Planning: Ability to own your team's budget and lead capacity planning initiatives. You will forecast future infrastructure needs to ensure we remain scalable while managing spend for subscriptions and hardware. Proactively identify operational risks and form contingency plans immediately to ensure business continuity.
• Procedure & Frameworks: Ability to define, maintain, and cascade operational procedures (SOPs) and ITIL standards.
• Prioritisation: Shield your team from noise by effectively prioritising workloads (Changes, Problems, and Projects) and managing stakeholder expectations.

Technical Support & Oversight:

• Performance Optimisation: Measure and optimise system performance with a focus on improving reliability and time‑to‑market. You will drive innovation to get ahead of internal customer needs rather than just reacting to them.
• Visual Documentation: Ensure the team produces detailed system design documentation, specifically enforcing the inclusion of visual representations to support understanding. Ability to technologically assess it as a technical editor. Ability to oversee the management of both On‑Premise and Cloud (GCP/AWS), ensuring high availability across all environments.
• Unblocking Issues: Act as the senior escalation point for complex technical issues. Your goal is not to fix the issue yourself, but to coordinate the right resources and provide air cover.

General Duties:

• On‑Call Duties: Willingness to participate in the Management On‑Call Rotation to support the department and the business (Current frequency: Once every three weeks).
• Ad‑Hoc: Carry out other strategic or technical duties required to support the Director/VP of Technical Operations.

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience:

• Proven Management Experience: Significant experience leading a technical team, with a specific focus on the people management aspect (performance reviews, career growth etc).
• Project Management: Strong project management experience with the ability to delegate effectively to meet tight deadlines. You must be able to multitask and maintain focus in a high‑priority environment.
• Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills. You must be able to liaise effectively with management and other business areas. Engagement may also include interactions with senior technical engineers/leaders within other teams and C‑Team members.
• Goal Oriented: You must be highly goal‑oriented with strict attention to detail, capable of prioritising workload and demand to ensure targets are met. Deep knowledge of and experience with ITIL practices, with the ability to apply them to improve team workflows. Demonstrated ability to apply Lean Six Sigma concepts.

Technical Environment & Team Capabilities: Focusing on the technical skills that your engineers possess, it would be ideal if you had a decent working knowledge of each of the areas. Hands‑on expertise in every area is not required, but the ability to hold and facilitate discussions, know when to push or hold back and when to ask poignant questions will help you effectively mentor the team and guide architectural decisions. For reference from above these areas are: on‑prem and AWS/GCP solutions; system design from network to application level; resilient database availability strategies; automation and configuration management via Ansible, Docker and CI/CD; programming awareness in Python; Linux administration. Your willingness to learn what you don’t know is required to succeed in this role and we will support you through that journey.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, and Experience: The following skills or experiences are advantageous but not strictly required. They would be utilised for facilitating tasks rather than for direct, hands‑on implementation.

• A keen interest in new technologies and innovation, specifically supporting development teams in the refactoring of technical debt.
• Advanced Containerization: Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Docker and container ecosystems.
• Observability: Experience with monitoring systems (e.g., Zabbix, Grafana) and logging stacks (Elasticsearch, Kibana).
• Data Streaming: Experience with data streaming and queuing technologies, specifically Apache Kafka and Druid.
• Web & Storage: Knowledge of Nginx (or other web server technologies) and storage technologies like Gluster.
• Tooling: Proficiency with JIRA and Confluence for project tracking and documentation.
• Version Control: Strong understanding of Git and version control best practices.

Why This Role? If you are an experienced technical leader who finds more satisfaction in growing people and building high‑performing teams than in closing tickets yourself, this is the role for you. You will have the autonomy to shape the culture of the Infrastructure function and the strategic backing to make a real impact on the business.

A Note to Candidates: At Partnerize, we recognise that the perfect candidate doesn't exist. If you are a strong people manager with a background in tech, but maybe haven't touched a command line in a few years - that’s okay! We are looking for leadership first. We encourage you to apply if you feel you have the management skills to help our team thrive.