The Group Infrastructure Manager is accountable for the strategy, governance, and overall performance of the Group’s IT infrastructure environment, spanning networks, servers, cloud platforms, end-user computing, workplace collaboration, and infrastructure security. Reporting to the IDT Director, the Manager owns the Group’s infrastructure and cloud roadmap, the infrastructure budget, and the vendor and service-provider portfolio, and is accountable for the reliability, security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of infrastructure services across all Group sites. The incumbent leads and develops a team of infrastructure and site-reliability professionals, sets technical direction, standards, and policies, drives cloud adoption and automation, and represents infrastructure to senior management and regional stakeholders — ensuring infrastructure capabilities are aligned with, and enable, the Group’s digital transformation agenda.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Strategic Planning and Predictive Readiness
- Develop, own, and govern the Group’s infrastructure and cloud roadmap, ensuring network, cloud, collaboration, and security investments are aligned with business priorities and the Group’s digital strategy.
- Define infrastructure standards, architecture principles, and policies, and ensure consistent adoption across all Group sites.
- Lead capacity planning, technology refresh, and lifecycle management to anticipate future business requirements, mitigate operational risk, and prevent technology obsolescence.
- Own the annual infrastructure budget, including capital and operating expenditure — securing funding, controlling spend, and ensuring value for money.
- Establish, govern, and periodically review IT disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans for critical infrastructure services.
- Evaluate emerging technologies — cloud services, AIOps, automation, workplace collaboration, and cybersecurity and make investment recommendations where they deliver measurable business value.
Operational and Service Accountability
- Hold overall accountability for the availability, performance, security, and cost-efficiency of all infrastructure services against agreed KPIs and SLAs.
- Govern incident, problem, and change management, ensuring major incidents are resolved, root causes addressed, and service stability maintained.
- Provide governance and assurance over infrastructure projects, ensuring delivery within approved scope, timeline, budget, and quality.
- Direct the management and optimisation of the Group’s cloud platforms to enhance scalability, security, resilience, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Ensure AIOps, observability, and site-reliability capabilities are developed and matured to drive proactive, resilient operations.
- Ensure infrastructure security, patch management, backup operations, and compliance activities are executed in accordance with Group IT policies, standards, and regulatory requirements.
People, Vendor and Commercial Leadership
- Lead, coach, and develop the infrastructure and site-reliability team — setting objectives, managing performance, and building capability and succession.
- Own vendor and service-provider relationships and contracts, including selection, negotiation, commercial management, and SLA governance to secure quality, accountability, and value-for-money outcomes.
- Represent infrastructure to the IDT Director, senior management, and regional stakeholders, providing assurance, insight, and recommendations.
Reporting and Insight
- Oversee monitoring and reporting of infrastructure availability, performance, capacity, utilisation, risk, and service levels against agreed KPIs and SLAs.
- Translate operational and performance trends into management insight and decisions on capacity planning, cost optimisation, service improvement, and risk mitigation.
- Ensure accurate asset records, configuration information, infrastructure documentation, and operational procedures are maintained by the team.
EXPERIENCE:
- Minimum experience in IT infrastructure of 12 years in a managerial role with accountability for teams, budgets, and vendor contracts.
- Proven track record owning and governing infrastructure and cloud strategy, roadmaps, and standards across multiple sites or countries.
- Strong experience managing infrastructure budgets (capital and operating), vendor selection, contract negotiation, and commercial governance.
- Experience leading cloud adoption and transformation across platforms (e.g. Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Microsoft 365) and hybrid environments.
- Experience embedding AIOps, observability, or site-reliability engineering (SRE) and ITIL service management at an organisational level.
- Solid grounding in infrastructure security, backup and disaster recovery, IT governance, and regulatory compliance.
- Broad experience administering or governing workplace-collaboration platforms (e.g. Microsoft 365, Teams, or Google Workspace). Experience leading multi-site or regional operations, ideally within a manufacturing or industrial environment.