Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Professional Services - 108069 - Grade 8

Job summary

Own and develop a virtualisation and storage platform supporting academic research in railway engineering. Lead reliable and secure operations, lifecycle upgrades, incident resolution, documentation, backups and disaster recovery, while supporting Linux-based workloads, databases and containerised services. Work with academic users and IT colleagues to deliver practical infrastructure solutions, including appropriate hybrid integrations with Azure and AWS.

Benefits

Qualifications

• Degree-level education or equivalent qualification, with substantial relevant technical experience; extensive progressively responsible experience may substitute for a qualification.
• Substantial experience administering enterprise virtualised infrastructure in production, including virtual machines and storage.
• Practical knowledge of virtualisation, storage, infrastructure lifecycle management, patching, upgrades and hardware replacement.
• Experience owning services across operational support, troubleshooting, documentation, security risk management and improvement.
• Ability to deliver change safely in live environments while managing continuity, risk and user impact.
• Understanding of infrastructure security principles and operational risk.
• Experience gathering requirements from users or stakeholders and delivering supportable technical solutions.
• Clear communication skills for explaining technical matters to non-specialists.
• Ability to work independently, investigate issues methodically and make sound technical decisions.
• Desirable experience with VMware vSphere, vCenter or vSAN; Veeam; Dell VxRail or comparable platforms; Aruba networking; Fortinet firewalls; Ubuntu Server; PostgreSQL or similar databases; Docker; Python; Azure or AWS; and research computing or research data governance.

Responsibilities

• Own and provide technical direction for the research virtualisation and storage platform.
• Maintain platform security, stability, performance, capacity, resilience and availability.
• Plan and deliver upgrades, lifecycle work and service improvements with minimal disruption.
• Operate the platform and resolve incidents affecting research services.
• Support research deployments and work with academic users to address operational needs.
• Translate research requirements into reliable, supportable technical solutions.
• Coordinate infrastructure hardware procurement and replacement.
• Identify security risks and implement proportionate mitigations.
• Maintain architecture, operational procedure, known issue and support documentation.
• Plan platform sustainability, support models and future technical direction.
• Maintain virtual machine and operating system build standards, configuration, patching and lifecycle management for Linux workloads.
• Support databases, containerised services, middleware and application-level operational needs.
• Support secure Azure and AWS integrations, including hybrid deployments.
• Review backup, recovery and disaster recovery arrangements.
• Follow change and risk management processes and engage suppliers for support and maintenance.
• Improve reliability and operational efficiency through standardisation, automation and scripting.
• Handle sensitive research data in accordance with data protection and institutional governance requirements.
• Contribute to incident reviews, continuous service improvement and inclusive working practices.

Skills

Degrees

Work schedule

Industry

Contract length

Relocation