Infrastructure Manager

INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGER Southampton / Hybrid £80k-£85k ROLE SUMMARY We are a telecommunications provider operating carrier-grade, on-prem infrastructure. We maintain our own IP space via RIPE, run our own ASN, and deliver business-critical unified communications and telephony services. The Infrastructure Manager is the senior owner of our entire network estate and the operational leader of the infrastructure team. This person is accountable for the reliability, performance and resilience of our network, and for the people, processes and governance that keep the team operating at a high standard. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will manage and direct the infrastructure team day-to-day, set the operational cadence, enforce policies and procedures, and own the network personally, from BGP and peering to the routers, switches and carrier relationships that underpin everything we do. ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT - On-prem, bare-metal infrastructure across four interconnected sites - Fibre ring topology with geographic resilience - Minimal public cloud usage - Business-critical production telecoms services with real-world uptime demands - A growing infrastructure team that requires strong technical leadership and operational maturity KEY RESPONSIBILITIES NETWORK OWNERSHIP - Own and operate the core IP network across all points of presence - Own all BGP operations within our ASN, including peering policy, prefix filtering, traffic engineering and failure recovery - Manage RIPE resources, IP allocations and routing policy hygiene - Maintain and develop peering and interconnects at LONAP, LINX and private links - Configure, operate and maintain the MikroTik and Juniper router and switch estate - Own all carrier and provider relationships, including contract management, escalation and service performance accountability - Lead all network-level incident response and post-incident root cause analysis PEOPLE MANAGEMENT & TEAM LEADERSHIP - Directly manage the infrastructure team, currently two engineers, with full line management responsibility - Run structured 1:1s, team stand-ups and operational reviews on a regular cadence - Set tasks, priorities and workloads across the infrastructure team - Approve holidays, manage team schedules and ensure adequate cover at all times - Conduct performance reviews and support the professional development of each team member - Identify and eliminate single points of failure in team capability and knowledge - Mentor engineers and create a culture of ownership, accountability and continuous improvement OPERATIONAL GOVERNANCE & PROCESS MANAGEMENT - Own and enforce change management processes across all infrastructure changes - Implement and maintain robust incident response, escalation and major incident procedures - Act as senior escalation lead for all Priority 1 and Priority 2 incidents - Drive post-incident reviews with clear root cause analysis and tracked corrective and preventive actions - Enforce policies for backup integrity, patching, vulnerability remediation and access control - Oversee disaster recovery and failover testing, ensuring procedures are validated regularly DOCUMENTATION & STANDARDS - Maintain accurate and up-to-date network diagrams, runbooks, SOPs and recovery documentation - Set and enforce documentation standards across the infrastructure team - Coordinate and sign off on DR and failover test outcomes - Provide senior support for managed customer networks, including Cisco, TP-Link Omada and DrayTek CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION - Collaborate with the Senior DevOps Engineer and service teams to align network and infrastructure strategy - Receive, review and approve architecture proposals and business cases from the DevOps function - Represent infrastructure operations in leadership meetings and present proposals to the board where required NETWORK & CUSTOMER ARCHITECTURE SUPPORT The Southampton office functions as a secondary production site, hosting compute infrastructure alongside an active business network serving the wider team. This is not a standard office network. It is managed to data centre standards and forms part of the overall infrastructure estate. - Own and maintain the office network infrastructure, treating it as a secondary data centre environment - Ensure the office network meets the same standards of reliability, segmentation and resilience as primary production sites - Liaise closely with the Head of Technical Services, Karl, to coordinate any network work required at the office location, ensuring clear ownership and no gaps in coverage - Act as the senior technical authority for network-related issues at the Southampton office, delegating physical work in conjunction with the Head of Technical Services as appropriate - Lend infrastructure expertise to complex, high-value customer network projects delivered by the Circle Cloud technical team - Work alongside the Head of Technical Services and sales/solutions teams to architect and validate technically complex customer network deployments - Provide senior-level expertise on customer network designs where carrier-grade knowledge or multi-site topology experience is required TELECOMMUNICATIONS PLATFORMS - Support and maintain core telephony and UC platforms, ensuring high availability for real-time communications workloads - Lead operational stability and migration readiness across legacy and strategic platform layers - Act as senior escalation for platform-level incidents impacting service continuity PERFORMANCE KPIs - Network uptime and availability against agreed monthly SLA targets - An annual performance bonus is tied to network uptime and operational KPIs. Outages or service-impacting incidents that are within the Infrastructure Manager's direct control will result in a deduction from this bonus. Incidents attributable to third-party provider failures, force majeure or factors demonstrably outside the role's direct control are excluded from any deduction - Incident MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve): sustained improvement in restoration speed for P1 and P2 incidents - Change success rate: reduction in failed or rolled-back production changes - Documentation coverage: critical runbooks, diagrams and SOPs complete, reviewed and audit-ready - RCA quality and closure: all major incidents resolved with a complete root cause analysis and corrective actions closed on time - Team performance: engineers are productive, developed and operating within clear frameworks REQUIRED EXPERIENCE - Advanced IP networking in carrier or ISP-level production environments - Deep, hands-on BGP operations, including traffic engineering, redundancy design and live incident recovery - Strong MikroTik RouterOS and Juniper Junos configuration and operations experience - RIPE resource management and IP administration - Proven team leadership with direct line management responsibility - Operational governance experience, including change control, incident management and process discipline - Strong documentation standards in production environments - Experience managing carrier and third-party provider relationships DESIRABLE EXPERIENCE - Prior experience in a telecoms or UC service provider environment - Familiarity with Proxmox, Docker or virtualisation platforms at an operational level - Mentoring and development of junior and mid-level engineers - Experience introducing enterprise-grade operational practices into growing teams WORKING STYLE - Hands-on, methodical and reliable in live production network environments - Calm, decisive and accountable under pressure - Strong ownership mindset, leading from the front and following through - Collaborative with DevOps, service and development teams - A leader who sets the bar, holds the team to it and supports them in meeting it WORKING HOURS Nominally 08:30 to 17:30. This is a senior role with autonomy and accountability. We value outcomes, ownership and effective time management over clock-watching. Out-of-hours support is required on a planned and escalation basis. BENEFITS - Company events - Company pension - Office canteen and games zone - Cycle to work scheme - Discounted or free food - Employee discount - Health and wellbeing programme - On-site parking - Private medical insurance - Referral programme - Work from home as part of an agreed hybrid pattern