Infrastructure Operations Lead

Infrastructure Operations Lead - High-Performance Computing

Location: West Sussex (on-site)

The Company

Our client operates one of the largest privately held supercomputing environments in Europe. Their technology underpins complex scientific and industrial workloads across energy, earth sciences, and digital infrastructure. They are a genuinely global operation with a long track record of investing in both their platforms and their people. This is not a company that treats IT as a cost centre; computing power is the core product.

Why This Role Exists

They need a people leader who can take charge of a platform and infrastructure support function. The team covers everything from virtualisation through to application-level support across a large-scale Linux estate. The current operation is stable, but the business wants to modernise how the team works: less reactive ticket-chasing, more structured service management, and a genuine shift towards automation and modern operational practices.

This is not a role where you sit behind a screen all day. You will be the go-to person when the Data Centre Manager is unavailable, which means you need to understand the full breadth of the operation: networking, hardware lifecycle, project delivery, and facilities. You will also be the bridge between the technical teams and internal stakeholders across the business.

What You Will Be Doing

• Running a team of infrastructure and platform engineers. Setting direction, managing workload, and creating an environment where people develop and perform.


• Owning service delivery across the Linux and virtualisation estate. Making sure operational standards are high, without micromanaging execution.


• Stepping in as the senior point of contact for the wider data centre operation when the manager is out. This means you need breadth, not just depth.


• Driving improvements in how the team operates. Moving away from legacy approaches towards more structured, automated, and repeatable ways of working.


• Working across departments to understand what the business needs from the platform and translating that into practical technical outcomes.


• Handling escalations. When complex issues land, you either resolve them or make sure the right people are mobilised to do so.

What We Are Looking For

The most important thing here is leadership. Technical credibility matters, but this is not a senior engineer role with a leadership title bolted on. We want someone who has genuinely led people: set objectives, had difficult conversations, coached underperformers, and built team capability over time.

• At least 3 years in a hands-on leadership role, managing technical staff. Not just project oversight, but actual line management and development responsibility.


• A solid grounding in Linux systems at scale. You do not need to be the deepest technical expert in the room, but you need to be credible with the team and understand what they are working on.


• Familiarity with configuration management and monitoring tools (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, or similar).


• Comfort with ITIL-aligned service management practices. A foundation-level certification is ideal.


• Experience with, or strong appetite for, Agile and DevOps ways of working. The business is actively moving in this direction.


• Confident communication. You will need to present to non-technical stakeholders and represent the team clearly and credibly.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to container platforms, cloud infrastructure, or orchestration tooling.


• Scripting ability in Python, Bash, or similar.


• Hands-on experience with hardware (servers, storage, GPUs) in a data centre setting.