Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations

A large, multi-site UK group is hiring a Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations to lead and evolve its infrastructure and operational capability across a complex, federated environment.

This is a senior leadership role with meaningful scale: you’ll own a broad infrastructure estate across dozens of locations, while leading Infrastructure, Operations and Service teams. You’ll be the senior escalation point, set standards and strategy, drive service improvement, and build confidence with divisional and operating-company stakeholders.

What you’ll do

• Lead Infrastructure, Operations and Service teams; build a high-accountability, service-led culture.
• Own stability, scalability and cost effectiveness across the infrastructure estate.
• Set multi-year strategy, standards and roadmap aligned to business strategy, risk appetite and value.
• Drive lifecycle management of the infrastructure estate (including migrations and modernisation).
• Lead major incident response and executive communications; embed post-incident learning.
• Improve internal customer outcomes and satisfaction; meet/exceed SLAs.
• Drive adoption of ITIL practices (incident, request, problem, change; weekly CAB; service catalogue; asset management).
• Manage key infrastructure suppliers (service/contract reviews; support agreement reviews).
• Support internal and third-party audits.
• Provide and present regular reports, outcomes, options and risk-based recommendations.
• Partner with central IT peers to meet functional requirements (e.g., InfoSec, Data Engineering, ERP, Data Protection, Web).

What we’re looking for

• Senior leadership experience across infrastructure + operations + service management.
• Strong, broad technical grounding (examples include Azure, on-prem migrations, backup & recovery, Cisco/Meraki, cloud telephony, Microsoft 365/O365).
• Proven delivery in a federated / multi-OpCo / multi-site environment (central + local IT).
• Board-level influence, diplomacy and commercial judgement (budgets, contracts, cost optimisation).
• Structured problem solving and decision framing; calm crisis leadership.
• Pragmatic approach to simplifying estates (cost vs risk vs speed).
• Comfortable being in the office regularly to build cohesion and accelerate delivery.