Operational Infrastructure Manager

Operational Infrastructure Manager

Location: London/Hybrid (3-4 days typically)

Type: Full time - Permanent (If you are a job share partnership, work reduced hours, or any other way of working flexibly, please do still get in touch)

Client: Specialty Insurance Broker

Role Purpose

You will lead the day-to-day running of our entire infrastructure estate including cloud, on-prem, network, identity, backup, DR, and security platforms. Your job is to keep everything stable, secure, resilient, cost-efficient, and continually improving.

This is a hands-on operations leadership role with real ownership: you'll run the operational infrastructure function like a managed service provider, drive down risk and technical debt, resolve escalations, and ensure the estate is always moving forward.

Reporting to the IT Director with a dotted line to the Head of IT Infrastructure who will have overall responsibility for infrastructure strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure Operations

• Own the daily performance, stability, and reliability of all infrastructure services (Azure, on-prem, networks, identity, backup, DR, security).
• Ensure platforms are monitored, patched, supported, and healthy.
• Maintain an accurate CMDB and ensure operational processes and documentation are kept up to date.
• Participate in out-of-hours work when required to minimise business disruption.
  
  

Resilience, Risk & Technical Debt

• Own and maintain infrastructure?related risk items, driving remediation to completion.
• Reduce vulnerabilities, end-of-life systems, legacy dependencies, and unmonitored assets.
• Lead disaster recovery readiness, including runbooks, testing, failover/failback, and alignment with business continuity requirements.
  
  

Incident, Escalation & Problem Management

• Act as the senior escalation point for infrastructure-related issues.
• Identify true root cause and implement robust, repeatable fixes.
• Produce or update KB articles and ensure teams are trained on new processes.
• Improve service flows and prevent repeat issues.
  
  

Supplier & Partner Leadership

• Work closely with an outsourced support team and external vendors.
• Run operational service reviews, track performance, and hold partners to account on SLAs.
• Ensure consistent delivery standards and aligned ways of working across internal and external teams.
  
  

Projects & Continuous Improvement

• Plan and deliver infrastructure changes and operational improvement projects (migrations, upgrades, tooling rollout, hardware refresh, etc.).
• Manage resource planning across BAU and project workloads.
• Look for ways to automate, simplify, and improve operational processes.
  
  

Standards, Governance & Collaboration

• Enforce strong engineering and operational standards across infrastructure.
• Ensure compliance with security, governance, and regulatory expectations.
• Work closely with Infrastructure, Cyber, Applications, and Architecture teams to align operations with overall IT strategy.
• Represent infrastructure within technical forums and change governance processes.
  
  

People Leadership

• Directly manage a small team of infrastructure engineers (Portugal-based), developing capability through coaching, mentoring, and cross-training.
• Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and proactive engineering.

Skills & Experience

• 5+ years leading IT infrastructure operations in a hybrid-cloud environment.
• Experience managing operational teams (internal, offshore, or outsourced).
• Strong understanding of cloud, on-prem, and network technologies.
• Proven track record reducing risk, improving stability, and eliminating technical debt.
• Experience in DR planning and resilience engineering.
• Able to translate complex technical detail into clear, business-friendly communication.
• Confident stakeholder manager; able to influence at all levels.
• Solid planning and delivery skills across both BAU and project work.
• Familiarity with ITIL processes (Incident, Problem, Change)
  
  

Technical Strengths (desired)

Azure IaaS/PaaS, AVD, SQL, Storage, Backup, Active Directory/Entra ID, Conditional Access, RBAC, firewalls (Fortinet), networking (Meraki/Cisco), VPN, Office 365, Mimecast, Rubrik/Acronis, monitoring platforms, automation, network segmentation, and ITOM/CMDB tooling.

What We Can Offer

We offer much more than just an inclusive culture with apprenticeships, study support, participation in our annual Spotlight Awards, Community Trust, Sports Teams, office socials, events and so much more. All of this with a supportive management team as well as working alongside some of the industry's top talent.

You'll have access to wellbeing programs, fantastic discounts across many big-name businesses including supermarkets, gym memberships, restaurants, and healthcare cash plans etc.

Further Perks Of Working With Us (Fixed Benefits)

• Employer pension contribution of 10% (providing you, the Employee provides 5%).
• Good wo