Technical Manager(Platform Lead)

The role involves taking ownership and evolving ‘The Sheds’ platform, bringing structure, clarity, and control to a complex environment spanning cluster infrastructure, networks, and backend services. You will lead a focused platform stabilisation effort, identifying technical risks, rationalising assets, and establishing clear ownership, dependencies, and operational standards across the platform. This includes addressing single points of failure, improving resilience, and coordinating specialist input across multiple domains including AV, networking, and compute.

Beyond initial stabilisation, you will drive ongoing platform delivery and governance, shaping how work is prioritised, sequenced, and executed. You will define and run structured intervention projects, implement robust intake and triage processes, and ensure all changes are delivered in a controlled and repeatable way. Working closely with stakeholders across ITS and the wider university, you will ensure platform changes are adopted smoothly, while embedding strong engineering practices, clear documentation, and continuous improvement into the core of the platform.

What will you be doing?

You will take ownership of the HPC platform and associated backend services, leading a small core engineering team while coordinating specialist input from audio-visual, networking and academic stakeholders. The role will not directly own all adjacent services but will need to work closely with those teams where platform delivery depends on them. Your initial focus will be to stabilise the platform, clarify ownership, reduce technical risk, and establish clear operating standards across infrastructure, services and environments.

You will drive the ongoing evolution of the platform, shaping and prioritising a pipeline of improvement work, and delivering targeted interventions to enhance resilience, performance, and usability. This includes working closely with academics and technical teams to ensure the platform meets real research and teaching needs, while enforcing a disciplined approach to change, delivery, and documentation. Alongside this, you will provide strong technical leadership — setting direction, defining standards, and supporting engineers to deliver high‑quality outcomes. You will be comfortable operating at both a strategic and hands‑on level, stepping into detail when needed, but maintaining a clear view of how the platform develops over time.

Key Responsibilities:

• Owning, operating and improving complex technical platforms across HPC, software and hardware infrastructure, backend services and user‑facing delivery.
• Leading small engineering teams and coordinating across specialist groups, including networking, AV, research teams, vendors and central IT.
• Stabilising existing systems by identifying risk, reducing complexity, improving documentation and introducing clear ownership.
• Designing and evolving HPC platform architecture with a focus on resilience, scalability, maintainability and secure operation.
• Using software development and DevOps practices to support automation, integration, CI/CD, monitoring, release control and incident management.

For a full view of the requirements, please refer to the attached job description.

Additional Information:

Please note that this role is internally recognised as a ‘Technical Manager.’ For informal queries please contact: Steve Leaback, School Technical Manager Email: (steve.leaback@bristol.ac.uk) Tel: 0117 456 1384

Contract type: Open ended with fixed funding for 3 years
Work pattern: Full time/35 hours per week
Grade: K
Salary: £51,753 - £58,225 per annum
School/Unit: Centre for Digital Futures
This advert will close at 23:59 UK time on 25/08/2026