An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Senior Technical Lead to drive the implementation of the Modern Network Programme at the University, delivering best in class network capabilities to our environment. This role combines hands‑on senior technical leadership with service delivery management, ensuring services are reliable, secure, cost‑effective and continually improving across the Modern Network workstreams. The Senior Technical Lead advances the University's Digital Infrastructure portfolio, providing effective technical leadership and service delivery management across our network infrastructure services. They will lead a digital‑first strategy, roadmap and operational support model that meets the evolving needs of education, research and professional services. The Digital Infrastructure portfolio is delivered through a blend of traditional on‑premises and hybrid‑cloud deployment models and underpins business‑critical services across the University. The Senior Technical Lead will report on service status, performance and risks; assess current capability and emerging technologies; and advise stakeholders to enable continuous improvement. The postholder will plan and manage resources effectively, and provide technical leadership for projects and change, including producing accurate planning information, estimates, and dependencies.
* Accountable for end‑to‑end service delivery across the Network and enabling Infrastructure platforms, ensuring services meet agreed SLAs/XLAs and operational performance targets (availability, resilience, performance, security, customer experience).
* Lead operational governance for the Modern Network services, including service reviews, KPI reporting, risk/issues management, stakeholder comms, and continuous service improvement plans.
* Support the Head of Digital Infrastructure to develop and mature a customer‑focused, digital‑first service, improving consistency and efficiency through standardised processes, tooling, automation and repeatable delivery patterns.
* Partner with the Head of Digital Infrastructure and Programme leadership to define and execute the Modern Network service strategy and roadmap, ensuring it meets current demand and future needs (capacity, coverage, resilience, scalability and security).
* Own supplier and contract performance for network/infrastructure support partners, ensuring delivery to SLAs, effective escalations, structured service reviews, and demonstrable value for money.
* Manage service risk using an agreed risk management framework, ensuring mitigations, controls, and governance are in place (including security, capacity, obsolescence, and operational resilience).
* Own operational resilience and service continuity for the network portfolio, ensuring disaster recovery and recovery/runbooks exist, are current, and are tested to an agreed schedule with tracked outcomes.
* Provide service transition leadership for the Modern Network Project: ensuring operational readiness, support model design, acceptance criteria, documentation, monitoring, training, and clean handover into BAU.
* Plan and assure change delivery (upgrades, patches, technology refresh, and network releases), ensuring proper testing, change control, communications, and post‑implementation review.
* Proactively manage service availability and capacity, using monitoring, trend analysis, and lifecycle planning to prevent incidents and ensure the network can meet forecast demand.
* Lead and co‑coordinate major incident, problem and escalation management for network services (including 2nd/3rd line leadership), ensuring timely resolution, supplier engagement, RCA, and prevention of recurrence.
* Develop team capability and ways of working, coaching team members and embedding consistent operational practices, collaboration tooling, and disciplined change/release management.
* Ensure multi‑party delivery alignment across products, vendors, internal teams and delivery partners so that dependencies are managed and outcomes are delivered end‑to‑end.
* Maintain oversight of critical infrastructure environments relevant to network delivery (e.g., core comms rooms / data centre network dependencies), ensuring capacity, safety compliance and availability targets are met (where in scope).
* Participate in the on‑call / out‑of‑hours arrangements as required to support major incidents, business continuity events, and planned maintenance windows, in line with University policy. proven experience of managing infrastructure and Network Teams, delivering services at enterprise scale to SLAs.
* proven experience of managing infrastructure and Network Teams, delivering services at enterprise scale to SLAs
* extensive experience in servers, storage, backups, and network technologies
* the ability to maintain effective relations with service suppliers to achieve issue resolution
* A good understanding of data centres and their operation to deliver services
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