Lead Hosting Platform Engineer

At United Utilities, technology is at the heart of delivering essential services to millions of customers. We're looking for an experienced Lead Hosting Platform Engineer to join our Hosting Platform Services team and play a key role in ensuring our enterprise hosting environments remain secure, resilient and available 24/7.

This is a fantastic opportunity for a senior infrastructure professional with deep expertise in Linux platforms, automation, virtualisation and enterprise hosting technologies to lead the evolution of our critical infrastructure estate.

As a technical lead and subject matter expert, you'll:

Lead the support, optimisation and continuous improvement of enterprise hosting platforms

Ensure highly available, secure and resilient infrastructure services across on-premise and hybrid cloud environments

Drive platform automation, lifecycle management, patching and security hardening

Provide technical leadership on upgrades, implementations and new technologies

Troubleshoot and resolve complex platform issues

Work closely with Security, Architecture and Operational teams to maintain best practice standards

Mentor engineers and help develop technical capability across the team

Support a culture of continuous improvement through monitoring, reporting and automation

We're particularly interested in candidates with strong enterprise Linux/Unix hosting platform experience , including:

✅ Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) administration and lifecycle management ✅ Linux/Unix platforms within large-scale enterprise environments ✅ Automation and configuration management using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform ✅ Red Hat Satellite and OS lifecycle management ✅ Scripting skills including Bash, PowerShell, Perl or similar ✅ VMware and virtualisation technologies ✅ High-availability hosting platforms and infrastructure ✅ Security hardening, SELinux, TLS, SSL and PKI ✅ Azure Cloud and Hybrid Infrastructure environments – Including Windows Server ✅ Enterprise storage and backup technologies including Veeam, SAN, HPE Alletra or Dell PowerStore

Ideally, you'll also hold (or be working towards) RHCSA, RHCE and/or ITIL certifications .

You'll be joining a highly respected team responsible for maintaining and evolving critical infrastructure services across an organisation managing over 50,000 technology assets.

In return, we offer:

26 days holiday, rising to 30 with service, plus bank holidays

Up to 14% employer pension contribution

Up to 10.5% annual bonus

Private healthcare

Enhanced parental leave and flexible working options

Wellbeing support programmes

Flexible benefits package

Voluntary share scheme

If you're a senior Linux and Hosting Platform specialist looking to influence enterprise-scale infrastructure, drive technical innovation and lead platform excellence within a critical-services environment, we'd love to hear from you.