Infrastructure Manager

Infrastructure Manager

Southampton / Hybrid

£80,000–£85,000

Role Summary

We are a telecommunications provider operating carrier-grade, on-premise infrastructure across four interconnected sites. We maintain our own IP space through RIPE, operate our own ASN and deliver business-critical unified communications and telephony services.

We are looking for an Infrastructure Manager to take senior ownership of our entire network estate and lead the infrastructure team. This is a hands-on leadership role, responsible for network reliability, performance and resilience, as well as team management, operational governance and technical standards.

You will personally own the network, from BGP, RIPE and peering through to routers, switches and carrier relationships, while leading a team of two engineers.

The Environment

• Carrier-grade, bare-metal infrastructure across four interconnected sites
• Fibre ring topology with geographic resilience
• Minimal public cloud usage
• Business-critical telecoms and UC services
• Growing infrastructure team requiring strong technical leadership

Key Responsibilities

Network Ownership

• Own and operate the core IP network across all points of presence
• Manage BGP within our ASN, including peering policy, prefix filtering, traffic engineering and failure recovery
• Manage RIPE resources, IP allocations and routing policy
• Maintain peering and interconnects including LONAP, LINX and private links
• Configure and maintain MikroTik and Juniper routers and switches
• Own carrier/provider relationships, escalations and service performance
• Lead network-level incident response and post-incident RCA

Team Leadership

• Directly manage two infrastructure engineers with full line management responsibility
• Run regular 1:1s, stand-ups and operational reviews
• Set priorities, workloads and team schedules
• Manage holidays and ensure adequate operational cover
• Conduct performance reviews and support professional development
• Identify and reduce knowledge and capability single points of failure
• Mentor engineers and build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement

Operational Governance

• Own and enforce change management across infrastructure
• Maintain incident, escalation and major incident procedures
• Act as senior escalation point for P1 and P2 incidents
• Drive post-incident reviews, RCA and corrective actions
• Enforce standards for backups, patching, vulnerability remediation and access control
• Oversee disaster recovery and failover testing

Documentation & Standards

• Maintain accurate network diagrams, runbooks, SOPs and recovery documentation
• Set documentation standards across the infrastructure team
• Coordinate and sign off DR and failover testing
• Provide senior support for managed customer networks, including Cisco, TP-Link Omada and DrayTek

Architecture & Collaboration

• Work closely with DevOps and service teams on infrastructure strategy
• Review and approve architecture proposals and business cases
• Represent infrastructure operations in leadership meetings and, where required, present proposals to the board
• Provide senior technical input into complex customer network projects and multi-site deployments

Southampton Production Site

Our Southampton office is a secondary production environment, hosting compute infrastructure alongside the business network. It is managed to data-centre standards and forms part of the wider infrastructure estate.

You will:

• Own the office network and ensure appropriate reliability, segmentation and resilience
• Coordinate network work with the Head of Technical Services
• Act as senior technical authority for network issues at the site
• Support complex, high-value customer network deployments alongside technical and sales/solutions teams

Telecommunications Platforms

• Support core telephony and UC platforms and maintain high availability
• Lead operational stability and migration readiness across platform layers
• Act as senior escalation point for platform incidents affecting service continuity

Performance Measures

Success will be measured against:

• Network uptime and agreed SLA targets
• P1/P2 incident MTTR and restoration times
• Change success rate and reduction in failed production changes
• Completion and quality of critical documentation
• Quality and timely closure of RCAs and corrective actions
• Infrastructure team performance, development and operational discipline

An annual performance bonus is linked to network uptime and operational KPIs. Deductions apply only to outages or service-impacting incidents within the Infrastructure Manager's direct control; third-party provider failures, force majeure and demonstrably external factors are excluded.

Required Experience

• Advanced IP networking within carrier, ISP or equivalent production environments
• Deep hands-on BGP experience, including traffic engineering, redundancy and live incident recovery
• Strong MikroTik RouterOS and Juniper Junos experience
• RIPE resource management and IP administration
• Proven people management and direct line management experience
• Strong operational governance, change control and incident management experience
• High standards of production documentation
• Experience managing carriers and third-party network providers

Desirable

• Telecoms, ISP or UC service provider experience
• Operational experience with Proxmox, Docker or virtualisation
• Experience mentoring junior/mid-level engineers
• Experience introducing structured operational practices into a growing team

Working Style

We need someone who is:

• Hands-on, methodical and reliable in live production environments
• Calm, decisive and accountable under pressure
• Comfortable taking ownership and leading from the front
• Collaborative across infrastructure, DevOps, service and development teams
• Able to set high standards while supporting and developing their team

Working Hours

Nominally 08:30–17:30, with flexibility expected at this senior level. Out-of-hours support is required on a planned and escalation basis.