Vice President, Windows & Hybrid Cloud Operations

About the Role

Lead the operation and evolution of enterprise Windows, Linux, and public and private cloud infrastructure. This role combines platform strategy, hands-on technical leadership, automation, and operational accountability to deliver secure, resilient and scalable infrastructure services.

You will oversee core compute, virtualisation, storage and recovery platforms, act as the senior technical escalation point, and develop an engineering-led operating model built around infrastructure as code, automated delivery and site reliability practices.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Strategy and Operations

Define technical standards, operational roadmaps and platform strategy across Windows, Linux, and public and private cloud infrastructure.
Own an evolving portfolio of enterprise platforms, including Windows Server, PKI, SCCM/MECM, SCOM, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV and Prism, vSAN, Citrix, Failover Clustering and secure file transfer services.
Establish the private cloud hypervisor strategy, segmenting workloads and directing migrations between VMware and Nutanix based on cost, risk and technical capability.
Lead Windows Server lifecycle management, large-scale upgrades and migrations, including adoption of new releases and hotpatching where appropriate.
Act as the senior L3 escalation point for complex incidents and recurring problems, troubleshooting performance across guest operating systems, hypervisors, storage fabrics and arrays.

Infrastructure as Code and Automated Delivery

Build and operate infrastructure as code for server provisioning and configuration across VMware and Nutanix, using Terraform or OpenTofu, Packer, Ansible and PowerShell DSC as appropriate.
Develop infrastructure CI/CD pipelines incorporating Git-based source control, peer review, linting, security scanning, automated testing—including Pester and Terraform tests—and controlled promotion between environments.
Implement immutable infrastructure practices through hardened, pipeline-built golden images, a rebuild-rather-than-repair approach, and automated detection and remediation of configuration drift.
Apply policy as code to infrastructure sizing, tagging, workload placement and security baselines, with secrets stored in a vault rather than source code.
Automatically create and update CMDB records, monitoring configurations and backup policies through provisioning pipelines.

Automation and Engineering

Write and review PowerShell and Python automation, establishing standards for code quality, testing, version control and documentation.
Use ITSM data to identify and measure repetitive operational work, reducing manual effort through automation and self-healing runbooks with defined safeguards.
Translate L2 operating procedures into executable, version-controlled runbooks that service providers can trigger through ServiceNow.
Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted operations for incident triage, alert correlation and code assistance, retaining human approval for production changes.

Reliability and Observability

Define service level indicators and objectives for core platform services, including authentication, DNS, file services and provisioning.
Establish error budgets and use them to guide the pace of change.
Develop observability across metrics, logs and synthetic checks, prioritising alerts that reflect user impact and ensuring every alert has an actionable runbook.
Lead blameless post-incident reviews and track corrective actions through completion.
Report operational performance through measures such as mean time to detect, mean time to restore, change failure rate and deployment lead time.
Take accountability for major incidents, on-call support and oversight of maintenance outside business hours.

Storage, Backup and Disaster Recovery

Own enterprise SAN, NAS, hyperconverged and object storage services, including capacity planning, performance, data reduction and cost per usable terabyte.
Design and operate backup and recovery services against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
Apply the 3-2-1-1-0 backup principle, including immutable and isolated backup copies.
Separate backup administration and control systems from production identity, enforcing multifactor authentication and dual approval for deletions and retention changes.
Maintain ransomware recovery capabilities, including clean-room restoration, malware scanning of recovery points and a tested Active Directory forest recovery plan.
Validate recoverability through automated restore testing and regular full disaster recovery exercises, reporting achieved RPO and RTO.

Security and Resilience

Partner with Cybersecurity and Audit teams to establish identity, privileged access and Windows security standards.
Implement controls including tiered administration, just-in-time privilege, Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) and managed service accounts.
Automate patch deployment through staged rings and health gates, and drive vulnerability remediation, disaster recovery readiness and platform resilience against defined service objectives.

Governance and Service Provider Management

Govern ITSM processes, change management, operational KPIs and service performance through ServiceNow.
Integrate infrastructure pipelines with change governance, enabling approved standard changes, automatically attached evidence and segregation of duties through peer review.
Maintain build and security baselines as code, aligned with CIS, NIST and Microsoft standards, supported by continuous compliance monitoring.
Maintain an exceptions register with accountable owners and expiry dates.
Align operational controls and evidence with applicable regulatory expectations, including the MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines.
Direct outsourced L2 providers through clear standards, executable runbooks, knowledge transfer and outcome-based service measures.

Leadership and Collaboration

Mentor and develop engineers, strengthening capabilities in coding, automation and reliability engineering.
Learn and apply emerging technologies as platform requirements evolve, contributing to broader infrastructure strategy.
Collaborate with application, network, security and infrastructure teams to deliver integrated services.

Essential Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or an equivalent qualification.
At least 10 years of enterprise Windows Server infrastructure experience, with substantial leadership responsibility and delivery of large-scale upgrades and migrations.
Windows and identity: Deep expertise in Windows Server, Active Directory, Entra ID, PKI and Failover Clustering, including tiered administration and AD forest recovery.
Virtualisation: Hands-on experience operating both VMware vSphere and Nutanix at enterprise scale, covering performance troubleshooting, capacity management and migration between platforms.
Infrastructure as code: Practical experience with Terraform, Packer, and Ansible or PowerShell DSC, including state management and configuration drift control.
Infrastructure CI/CD: Experience building and operating pipelines with Git, peer review, automated testing and policy as code.
Immutable infrastructure: Demonstrated delivery of golden-image pipelines and rebuild-rather-than-repair operating models for Windows environments.
Coding and automation: Strong PowerShell skills, working Python proficiency, and evidence of measurable reductions in manual operational work through automation and self-healing capabilities.
Site reliability engineering: Experience defining SLIs and SLOs, managing error budgets, developing observability and actionable alerts, and leading blameless incident reviews.
Storage: Experience designing and troubleshooting enterprise SAN, NAS, hyperconverged and object storage.
Backup and recovery: Experience designing backup platforms, implementing immutable and isolated copies, and demonstrating ransomware recovery and restore/DR testing against RPO and RTO.
Operational governance: Strong ITSM, ServiceNow and change management experience, including standards as code and integration of automation with change and CMDB controls.
Service provider leadership: Experience managing outsourced or managed service providers and serving as the senior technical escalation point.
Learning agility: Evidence of quickly acquiring and applying new technologies, supported by recent production delivery outcomes.

Desirable Experience

Citrix, SCCM/MECM and SCOM, alongside modern alternatives such as Intune, Azure Arc or OpenTelemetry-based monitoring.
Delivery of a hypervisor migration or consolidation programme.
Public cloud infrastructure management across AWS and/or Azure, including hybrid environments.
Familiarity with CIS and NIST frameworks and regulatory expectations such as the MAS Technology Risk Management Guidelines.
Controlled adoption of AI tools within infrastructure operations.

Preferred Certifications

Certifications are advantageous rather than mandatory; demonstrated delivery and practical expertise carry greater weight.

Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate
Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate
VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)
Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI)
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
Relevant backup platform certification, such as Veeam VMCE or Commvault
Citrix Certified Associate – Virtualization
ITIL 4 Foundation

Interested candidates, please apply and submit your CVs to [HIDDEN TEXT].

Windows & Cloud Operations Engineer