Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Location: Manchester (Hybrid)

Sector: Online Marketplace

The Opportunity

We’re working with a well-established, international online marketplace to recruit a Lead Infrastructure Engineer to play a key role in the reliability, security and ongoing evolution of its technology infrastructure.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, ideal for someone who enjoys getting into the detail technically while taking ownership of infrastructure projects, leading engineers and coordinating external technology partners.

You’ll lead a team of engineers. Reporting to the Head of IT, you’ll take ownership of the infrastructure roadmap, drive end-to-end project delivery and help shape how cloud infrastructure and emerging AI technologies are governed and operated.

The business is investing in its technology environment, making this an opportunity to influence technical direction, improve operational maturity and deliver meaningful infrastructure improvements at scale.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Lead and develop the team: Provide technical direction and day-to-day leadership to five UK-based engineers, promoting ownership, collaboration and high engineering standards.
• Own infrastructure delivery: Take responsibility for the end-to-end delivery of infrastructure projects, from planning and design through to implementation and ongoing optimisation.
• Drive the technical roadmap: Prioritise and deliver infrastructure initiatives aligned with business requirements, security standards and long-term technology objectives.
• Lead cloud infrastructure: Oversee the reliability, performance, security and scalability of AWS environments, ensuring infrastructure remains resilient and fit for purpose.
• Manage external partners: Coordinate outsourced technology providers, setting expectations, monitoring performance and driving accountability and service improvements.
• Improve operational reliability: Lead complex incidents, identify root causes and implement improvements to monitoring, alerting, automation and recovery processes.
• Embed cloud governance: Establish and maintain standards around infrastructure changes, security, resilience, cost optimisation and operational controls.
• Support AI adoption: Help establish the infrastructure, gateways and governance required to integrate AI capabilities into an operational cloud environment.
• Work cross-functionally: Collaborate with IT, Engineering, Security and wider business stakeholders to ensure infrastructure decisions support commercial and technical priorities.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience in Infrastructure Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure or IT Operations within a business-critical environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS , ideally across services such as EC2, Route 53, CloudWatch, Lambda, CloudFront and WAF.
• Experience leading engineers or providing technical leadership within an infrastructure or cloud team.
• A track record of delivering infrastructure projects and managing technical roadmaps from planning through to implementation.
• Experience managing third-party technology providers, including service expectations, performance, escalations and delivery.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, governance, resilience, monitoring and operational best practices.
• Experience with infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• The ability to balance hands-on technical work with leadership, stakeholder management and project delivery.
• A proactive approach to problem-solving, continuous improvement and technical decision-making.
• Experience with Windows Server, Active Directory, Entra ID, PowerShell, CI/CD and cloud cost optimisation would also be beneficial.

Why Consider This Role?

• Technical ownership: Take responsibility for the infrastructure roadmap and the delivery of key projects.
• Leadership without losing the technical edge: Lead a team while remaining close to the technology and architecture.
• International scale: Support a substantial online marketplace with complex infrastructure and operational requirements.
• Cloud and AI exposure: Contribute to the evolution of cloud infrastructure and the governance of AI within operational environments.
• Influence: Work closely with the Head of IT and external technology partners to improve infrastructure capability and service delivery.

If you’re an Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Lead or technically hands-on Infrastructure Lead looking for greater ownership, leadership responsibility and the opportunity to shape an evolving technology environment, we’d be keen to hear from you.

Interested? Apply today or get in touch for a confidential conversation.