Operations Resources - Recruitment
3rd Line Team Leader
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3rdLine IT Infrastructure and Security Team Leader
£50,000 - £60,000, hybrid flexibility.
Working from an MSP in Cardiff responsible for supervision of the 3rd line service desk team that provide IT Infrastructure and Security support to clients across the UK and Ireland.
Technically hands-on role, acting as point of escalation for the team as well as responsible for maintaining SLA and contractual commitments and team leadership.
Job Specification
3rd Line Service Desk Team Leader
Reporting to: Head of Service Desk
Location: UK: Cardiff Office/Remote
Days: Various
Role Purpose
The 3rd Line Team Leader is responsible for the leadership, technical direction, performance, and continual improvement of the 3rd Line Infrastructure and Security function. This role combines advanced technical expertise with operational leadership, ensuring the delivery of secure, resilient, and high-performing IT services across customer and internal environments.
The successful candidate will possess significant hands-on experience across infrastructure, networking, cloud, endpoint management, and cybersecurity technologies. They will have "battle scars" and learnings from operating within complex IT support environments and will be capable of leading from the front during major incidents, security incidents, escalations, and technical transformations.
The role is accountable for managing team workload, setting daily and weekly priorities, improving service performance, developing technical capability within the team, and driving operational excellence through ITIL best practice. The individual will also be responsible for producing and presenting meaningful operational and service performance reporting, turning data and insights into actionable improvement plans for customers and internal stakeholders.
The position supports the MSP's strategic objective of delivering mature, secure, and scalable IT managed services whilst continuously improving customer experience and operational efficiency. The MSP's managed services include infrastructure support, patch management, endpoint management, security V&M, monitoring, backup management, Intune, Autopilot, and cloud-based service delivery.
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & People Management
- Lead, mentor and develop the 3rd Line Engineering team.
- Set daily, weekly and monthly priorities aligned to business objectives.
- Manage resource allocation and workload balancing across customer environments.
- Conduct performance reviews, coaching sessions and personal development planning.
- Create a culture of accountability, ownership and technical excellence.
- Promote knowledge sharing and continuous learning across the function.
- Support recruitment, onboarding and succession planning activities.
Technical Leadership
- Act as the senior escalation point for complex infrastructure, security, networking and cloud issues.
- Provide technical leadership during Major Incidents, Problem Management activities and security events.
- Drive root cause analysis and ensure lessons learned are implemented.
- Review technical designs and infrastructure changes to ensure alignment with best practice.
- Hands-on management of complex tickets and ensuring continues learning within the team, demonstrating disciplines Identify > resolve > document > learn.
- Develop automation of Ticket resolution and incident prevention methodology utilizing the customer and the MSP's toolset.
- Maintain oversight of platform health, resilience, security posture and service availability.
- Ensure technical standards are consistently applied across managed customer environments.
- Accountable for team performance across a range of business and customer KPIs.
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Infrastructure Management
- Provide technical leadership and governance across:
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Intune
- Windows Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft 365
- Windows Server
- Active Directory
- Virtualisation platforms
- Storage technologies
- Backup and recovery platforms
- Enterprise networking
- Firewalls and secure connectivity solutions
- Endpoint management platforms
- RMM solutions
- MDM platforms
- Monitoring and alerting technologies
The role will also oversee infrastructure patching, endpoint compliance, security hardening and service continuity activities.
Security & Compliance
- Maintain oversight of security operations across customer environments.
- Ensure vulnerabilities are identified, prioritised and remediated.
- Lead security incident investigations and coordinate responses.
- Monitor security trends and emerging threats.
- Ensure adherence to the MSP's security standards, ISO controls and customer contractual requirements.
- Drive continual improvement in security monitoring, reporting and operational maturity.
- Collaborate with compliance and governance teams to support audits and certifications.
The successful candidate will possess strong experience in investigating and resolving incidents across networks, endpoints, cloud platforms and identity services whilst operating within formal Security Incident and Major Incident processes.
Service Management & ITIL Governance
- Operate in accordance with ITIL and ITSM best practice.
- Own and improve L3 Incident Management processes.
- Shift left drive to L2, ensuring L2 teams have the skills, tools and access required to resolve incidents without the need for L3 or Architect intervention.
- Reduce recurring incidents through Problem Management and trend analysis.
- Ensure SLA, KPI and contractual commitments are achieved.
- Drive service maturity initiatives and operational improvements.
- Support knowledge management and shift-left strategies.
The MSP's service governance model includes objectives around SLA performance, incident resolution, customer satisfaction, reducing aged incidents and effective knowledge management.
Reporting & Data Analytics
- Produce weekly and monthly operational and service performance reports.
- Analyse infrastructure, security and service performance trends and provide insights.
- Track resource utilisation and team productivity metrics.
- Report on SLA performance, incident trends, vulnerabilities and remediation progress.
- Present actionable recommendations to leadership teams.
- Translate technical reporting into meaningful business outcomes and improvement plans.
- Support customer service reviews and governance meetings.
Key Performance Indicators
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- SLA achievement
- Incident resolution performance
- Major Incident reduction
- Vulnerability remediation compliance
- Patch compliance levels
- Service availability
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- Team productivity and utilisation
- Reduction in aged incidents
- Knowledge article adoption
- Employee engagement and retention
Knowledge, Skills & Experience
Essential
- Leadership
- Proven experience leading senior technical teams within an MSP, Managed Service or Enterprise IT environment.
- Demonstrable experience managing team performance and operational priorities.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Technical
- Minimum 7 years' experience in infrastructure, networking and security environments.
- Strong experience supporting Microsoft Azure environments.
- Expert knowledge of:
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Intune
- Windows Defender
- Microsoft 365
- Active Directory
- Windows Server
- Networking technologies
- Firewalls
- Endpoint Security
- RMM platforms
- MDM technologies
- Experience with infrastructure monitoring, patch management and automation tooling.
- Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles and operational security practices.
- Service Management
- Strong understanding of ITSM.
- Strong working knowledge of ITIL principles.
- Experience delivering continual service improvement initiatives.
- Reporting & Analytics
- Advanced reporting and analytical capability.
- Ability to transform operational data into actionable business insights.
- Experience presenting technical information to senior stakeholders and customers.
Desirable
- Microsoft Azure certifications.
- ITIL Foundation or higher.
- Microsoft Security certifications.
- CISSP, CISA or equivalent security qualifications.
- Experience in retail, hospitality or multi-site IT environments.
- Experience supporting regulated or PCI-compliant environments.
- Experience implementing automation and operational efficiencies.
Behavioural Competencies
- Leads by example.
- Demonstrates accountability for the team and themselves
- Calm and decisive under pressure.
- Takes ownership and accountability.
- Highly analytical and data driven.
- Excellent communicator.
- Customer focused.
- Collaborative and supportive leader.
- Challenges poor practice constructively.
- Passionate about technical excellence and continual improvement.
- Committed to developing team capability and future leaders.
The MSP's Values
The successful candidate will demonstrate The MSP's commitment to:
- Delivering on commitments to customers and colleagues.
- Creating an environment where people can become the best they can be.
- Continuously improving services and capabilities.
- Acting with integrity, professionalism and accountability.
- Delivering secure, reliable and high-quality technology services.
Suggested salary band: £50,000 - £60,000 + benefits (depending on experience and security expertise).
This role would sit naturally alongside the new IT MS organisational design and could act as the senior operational lead beneath the IT MS Manager for all Infrastructure, Security and 3rd Line Service functions.
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