Group Director – Infrastructure and Cloud

Job purpose

Strategy and platform leadership

• Create a costed, sequenced infrastructure, cloud, and workplace-services roadmap aligned with corporate priorities.
• Own platform architecture and engineering standards for resilient, scalable, observable, secure-by-design solutions.
• Track the platform footprint, technical debt, end-of-life exposure, transition plans, and refresh cycles.
• Evaluate infrastructure as code, automation, AI-assisted operations, and cloud-native capabilities for operational or financial benefit.
• Maintain strategic partner relationships through roadmaps, escalation paths, and structured service reviews.

Data centre and network

• Direct enterprise compute, virtualization, and hyperconverged platforms; plan capacity and manage utilization.
• Own enterprise storage and data protection, including tiering, forecasting, backup infrastructure, and retention.
• Maintain hardware lifecycle and refresh programs, standards, configuration compliance, and legacy-platform consolidation.
• Own corporate-site network architecture and operations across LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, wireless, remote access, internet edge, and cloud connectivity.
• Manage network availability, performance, segmentation, capacity, provider service levels, standards, documentation, and change discipline.
• Support new developments, site fit-outs, and asset handovers with required network and connectivity capabilities.

Cloud and workplace platforms

• Own the hybrid and multi-cloud estate across Azure and AWS, including architecture and landing-zone governance.
• Set cloud guardrails for account structure, tagging, network topology, identity integration, and configuration baselines.
• Run cloud FinOps through consumption visibility, rightsizing, savings plans, anomaly detection, and cost allocation.
• Ensure cloud workloads meet data-residency and regulatory requirements; lead migration and modernization with operational-readiness validation.
• Make infrastructure as code and automated deployment pipelines the default for cloud environments.
• Own Microsoft 365 governance, service health, licensing, and adoption roadmap; oversee end-user computing and Microsoft Entra ID operations.

Resilience and service delivery

• Establish platform high availability and documented recovery objectives proportionate to business criticality.
• Own disaster-recovery runbooks, replication, recovery environments, scheduled testing, and remediation of identified gaps.
• Ensure backup and recovery coverage and restore testing, including protection against destructive and ransomware scenarios with Cybersecurity.
• Support business continuity and lead technology recovery during major disruption events.
• Ensure operational coverage, documented procedures, ownership, and on-call and escalation arrangements.
• Manage capacity, performance, availability, observability, patching, incidents, problems, changes, configuration, releases, and continuous improvement.

Security, vendors, and finance

• Sustain infrastructure, cloud, and workplace security controls under shared accountability with Cybersecurity.
• Remediate vulnerabilities to agreed service levels; document exceptions and accepted risks.
• Maintain the platform technology risk register and report mitigation progress to risk and audit forums.
• Meet regulatory, data-residency, and Group policy requirements and provide audit evidence.
• Own OPEX and CAPEX budgets, forecasting, accruals, variance analysis, and year-end landing.
• Manage strategic vendors, managed-service providers, and system integrators against KPIs, service levels, and outcomes.

Qualification

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Master’s degree preferred.
• Relevant professional certifications preferred, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft 365, ITIL, VMware, Cisco, Aruba, or TOGAF.