Infrastructure Program Manager

Program Manager - Infrastructure & Cloud Migration (Azure / AVS)

Location: Brussels, hybrid (3 days onsite per week minimum)

Contract: 6 months, renewable

About the role

You own the programme end to end: the plan, the business case, the governance and the outcome. Technical design sits with the architects. Accountability for delivery sits with you.

The estate is business-critical, so every migration wave must land with minimal downtime and a tested way back. The role suits someone who has already taken a VMware estate into AVS and knows where these programmes go wrong: network extension and cutover, licensing and node sizing, application dependencies, and the readiness of the team that will run the platform.

You will spend as much time with executives as with engineers. Expect to brief the C-suite on progress, risk and cost, and to bring them clear options when a decision is needed.

Key responsibilities

Programme leadership and planning

• Own the integrated programme plan: discovery, AVS and landing-zone build, migration waves, decommissioning and data-centre exit.
• Define the critical path, dependencies and milestones. Keep a baselined plan and manage change against it.
• Group the estate into migration waves with application owners, based on dependency mapping, business criticality and change windows.
• Run cutover planning: go/no-go criteria, rehearsals, rollback plans and hypercare.

Executive engagement and reporting

• Act as the single point of accountability to the sponsor and steering committee.
• Produce concise executive reporting: status against plan, spend against budget, top risks and decisions required.
• Present to C-level and board audiences. Turn technical issues into business options with cost, risk and time attached.
• Define and report programme KPIs: workloads migrated, downtime per wave, cost against business case, decommissioning progress.

Governance, risk and finance

• Set up and run programme governance: steering committee, design authority, change control and RAID.
• Own the budget and forecast, including AVS node capacity, reserved-instance commitments, VMware licensing and dual-running costs.
• Track benefits against the business case, including the data-centre exit date and the end of dual running.
• Make sure security, compliance and audit requirements are built into each wave, not retrofitted.

Transition to operations and transformation

• Agree the target operating model with the operations lead. Hand over each wave with runbooks, monitoring and support in place.
• Lead the people side of the change: communications, training and readiness of the teams that will run AVS.
• Set the roadmap beyond lift-and-shift: which workloads stay on AVS and which move to Azure-native services.

Essential experience

Candidates without direct AVS programme experience will not be shortlisted. General Azure or VMware experience is not a substitute.

• AVS migration delivery. Programme-level leadership of at least one completed migration from on-premises VMware to Azure VMware Solution, ideally through to data-centre exit. You can name the estate size, the timeline and what went wrong.
• AVS working knowledge. Enough to challenge architects and vendors: Azure Migrate assessment, HCX mobility and network extension, ExpressRoute connectivity, NSX networking, vSAN capacity planning, backup and DR options.
• Programme management. Typically 10+ years in IT delivery, with 5+ leading infrastructure or cloud transformation programmes with multi-million budgets and multi-vendor teams.
• C-level engagement. Regular, direct work with executives: steering committees, board papers, escalations and difficult messages delivered early.
• Planning. Integrated plans, critical-path and dependency management, wave planning, cutover and rollback planning.
• Reporting and finance. Executive reporting, budget ownership, forecasting, benefits tracking and RAID management.
• Critical workloads. Migration of business-critical systems under tight change windows and availability targets.
• Vendor management. Commercial and delivery management of Microsoft and systems integrators.
• Methodology. MSP, PRINCE2, PMP or equivalent, applied pragmatically.
• Communication. Fluent written and spoken English.

Desirable

• A full data-centre exit: contract terminations, hardware disposal and closing out dual running.
• VMware licensing under Broadcom (VCF subscriptions) and its effect on an AVS business case.
• Azure landing zones and the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework.
• Post-migration modernisation from AVS to Azure-native services.
• FinOps practice: cost allocation, reserved capacity and right-sizing after migration.
• ITIL-based service transition, ideally with ServiceNow.
• Regulated or mission-critical sectors with formal change and audit regimes.
• Exposure to other hyperscaler VMware services, such as Amazon EVS or Google Cloud VMware Engine.
• A Microsoft Azure or VMware certification.

Competencies

• Executive presence. Says where the programme really stands, including when it is red, and arrives with options.
• Structure. Turns an ambiguous scope into a plan people can follow and be held to.
• Technical credibility. Not an engineer, but cannot be bluffed by one.
• Commercial judgement. Reads a statement of work closely and holds suppliers to it.
• Calm under pressure. Decisive at go/no-go and steady during a difficult cutover.
• Trust. Brings along teams whose roles will change because of the migration.