Platform Infrastructure Lead

John Lewis • fulltime • Bracknell Campus, UK • 2w ago

At a glance

Working pattern - This is a hybrid working role, therefore your time will primarily be split between working from home and the Bracknell Head Office, There will be occasional travel to our London office
The Managed Infrastructure team aims to spend 1 to 2 days a week in the office to connect, specifically Tuesday, and on a more ad-hoc basis to attend key meetings.
Salary range - The expected salary for this role is set at £57,600 - £92,400
Contract type - 2 Secondment roles (23 months)

Key responsibilities

As a senior member, you will be working as part of a large team covering a spectrum of technologies in a modern hybrid enterprise environment where interdependencies make up a proficient infrastructure capability.

You will drive and be accountable for the outcomes the business requires in relation to your services. This means that you will be working effectively with Partners, vendors, and our strategic third party service providers to ensure effective delivery of the service, and strategy, whilst managing operational risks throughout.

Your wealth of expertise will be instrumental in running agile product teams and driving forward the technology roadmap. Additionally, you will be expected to manage and support business-critical or escalated issues, providing effective solutions.

In the event of a major incident, you will act as the technical authority, communicating effectively with all stakeholders, coordinating the technical response, and ensuring clear and concise updates are provided throughout the resolution process. You will participate in post incident reviews, owning actions within your tower.

This role demands effective communication and coordination abilities. You will need to build positive working relationships within cross-functional teams, ensuring everyone is aligned and informed, whilst also maintaining clear and productive communication with external vendors.

As the Platform Infrastructure Lead you will:

Develop working relationships with key business stakeholders and build understanding of the commercial, technical, and operational landscape and business strategy

As a Platform Infrastructure Lead you will have responsibility for technology towers and will strongly influence how the platform evolves to meet business needs. You will work with a diverse range of technical and non-technical stakeholders which will require comprehensive communication skills.

Be the product owner for your key technology towers, both on-premise and cloud

As Product Owner, define the vision for the product backlog and prioritise product group workloads to deliver business and technical requirements

Work collaboratively with with internal agile engineering teams

Develop the product groups into high performing agile engineering teams

Deliver value for John Lewis Partnership by ensuring quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness from all infrastructure management contracts

Manage suppliers and vendors to ensure Infrastructure Platforms remain secure, stable, robust and performant by delivering and maintaining end to end Operational Excellence

Ensure that the services provided by vendors and managed service suppliers deliver against agreed SLAs, key metrics, and statements of work

Use your knowledge and experience of infrastructure platform services and an understanding of its consumption by the business, to develop a forecast of demand for the service and (by extension) the vendor’s services

Manage third party provision of infrastructure services and maintain operational integrity

Work with Architecture to ensure deliverables are aligned with the business and technical strategy, producing business cases to deliver change and innovation, and translate architectural designs into operations.

Ensure full life cycle management is planned, managed and delivered across the infrastructure estate; with published and managed roadmaps, aligned to strategy

Be the technical SME and authoritative point of escalation for your technology towers

Identify and deliver cost efficiencies across all commercial contracts in scope of your technologies, establishing value for the Partnership

Manage utilisation against entitlement of commercial products, ensure robust Capacity Management process and reporting are in place.

You will also have key input into deriving efficiency in cost management and consumption, working alongside FinOps when required

You will shape and implement policy alongside Security Operations.

You will work closely with the other Infrastructure areas and interface with the established Product & Platform teams to embed capability within areas.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need

Deep technical expertise and experience in key technologies as defined below including experience of cloud, infrastructure and microservice architecture.

Proven history of developing IT Delivery in a lean and agile environment through supporting and motivating technical teams to deliver growth.

Demonstrable experience in leading managed services / high-value third-party contracts in a complex enterprise IT environment.

Comprehensive knowledge of agile methodologies & DevSecOps frameworks.

Effective communication skills that go beyond “tech talk” – the ability to translate complex IT matters to those without an IT background.

A credible and established expert with good commercial and operational acumen, who is able to demonstrate extensive knowledge and hands-on experience in building positive relationships, including third parties.

A comprehensive knowledge of modern Hosted Service principles, along with proven experience of how these technologies support an enterprise business.

Proven experience of managing high value third party contracts delivered predominantly offshore, and having budgetary management skills, understanding of contract penalties and experience with service renewals and supporting processes

The ability to work in a time-sensitive situation in a busy environment, with effective problem-solving skills, an analytical mind and demonstrate a high attention to detail

We have a number of towers in the Platform Infrastructure team and we are looking for candidates with skills to be aligned to any one or more of these scopes

Scope A

Databases | Middleware

- Database - MS SQL | PostgreSQL | IBM DB2 | Oracle

Scope B

Data Centre Hosting | Mainframe | IBM Power

- Data Centre Hosting - IBM Mainframe

- Data Centre Hosting - IBM Power Series

- Operating Systems - AIX | Linux (Red Hat; SUSE; Oracle)

Scope C

Data Centre Hosting | Wintel | VMware | Identity

- Data Centre Hosting - Virtualisation (VMware | GCVE)

- Operating Systems - Wintel

- Active Directory | Identity and Access Management | PAM | MFA | Data Security | SSO

We do not expect applicants to possess all the skills across different towers and would encourage applications as long as you have the skills and experience to fit into one of them.

Desirable skills/experience you may have

Experience working with a hybrid cloud presentation comprising large elements of on-premise and public cloud workloads.
FinOps experience: Budgeting/Forecasting/Cost Optimisation with a PxQ billing model.
Experience in the retail sector, both physical and or online.

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