Your new companyThis is a highly successful and forward-thinking further education organisation with a reputation for excellence, innovation, and student achievement. Supporting thousands of learners across multiple campuses, the group continues to invest significantly in its people, technology, and facilities to ensure an outstanding experience for both staff and students. With ambitious plans for digital transformation and infrastructure modernisation, this is an exciting opportunity to join an organisation where technology is recognised as a key enabler of success and where your contribution will have a genuine impact across the business. This newly created role will report directly to the Head of IT and the successful candidate will be joining a well-established and experienced team of IT specialists where they will have the opportunity to further develop their own skills and experience.Your new roleAs Infrastructure Manager, you will take ownership of the college's core IT infrastructure, ensuring the stability, performance, security and future development of critical systems across the college. A key focus of the role will be the management, support and ongoing enhancement of the college's VMware environment, making proven VMware vSphere experience essential. You will lead on the administration of virtual machines, storage platforms, backup technologies and disaster recovery planning, while proactively monitoring performance, capacity and availability to ensure a resilient and highly available infrastructure. You will also play a central role in infrastructure life cycle management, delivering upgrades and improvements that support the college's long-term digital strategy.Alongside infrastructure responsibilities, you will help oversee the College's enterprise networking estate, including HPE/Aruba switching and Cisco Meraki wireless technologies, whilst ensuring robust security controls are maintained across both on-premises and cloud environments. You will be responsible for managing security updates, patching, identity and access management through Microsoft Entra ID and Azure AD, and responding to vulnerabilities and emerging threats. Looking ahead, you will support several strategic technology projects, including the migration from on-premises Exchange and file storage to Microsoft 365, helping to deliver a modern, secure and collaborative digital workplace. As a senior technical lead, you will act as an escalation point for complex issues, work closely with stakeholders and third-party partners, mentor junior engineers, and drive best practice across the IT function. Please note, this role is on site 5 days a week in the Stoke-on-Trent area, with 1 primary site and occasional travel required to others within the group, which are all local.
