The Role

Natural Resources Wales is seeking a Lead Infrastructure Operations Engineer to ensure critical ICT services are secure, resilient, and effectively managed. This senior role within Digital, Data and Technology leads the operation, support, and maintenance of physical and virtual infrastructure, ensuring performance, security, and service standards are consistently met, including support for business-critical systems and out-of-hours cover where required.

You will provide technical leadership across live service operations, working with internal teams, service owners, projects, and suppliers to manage priorities, workloads, and service quality. The role involves overseeing incident and problem resolution, ensuring root causes are identified and addressed, and supporting change and service transition by embedding operational readiness, resilience, and support models early in delivery.

You will contribute to service improvement and operational roadmaps, using monitoring tools, service data, and stakeholder feedback to identify risks and opportunities. The role operates across a Microsoft-based environment (Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Defender, AVD), ensuring services are secure, well-documented, and aligned to organisational and ITIL practices.

Responsibilities also include managing third-party suppliers, ensuring contractual and regulatory compliance, and overseeing delegated budgets to deliver value for money. You will lead and support a team of engineers, providing day-to-day technical direction while influencing projects, suppliers, and service improvements.

Driving is essential to this role as you will be required to drive to datacentres or remote offices for physical infrastructure maintenance and support, therefore you must hold a full and current UK driving license.

As an organisation, we support flexible working. You will be contracted to the nearest NRW office to your home and a suitable hybrid working pattern will be agreed on appointment. Any regular face-to-face meetings or training will be planned in advance.

To make an informal enquiry about this role, please contact Ian Johns at Ian.Johns@cyfoethnaturiolcymru.gov.uk

Interviews will be face-to-face on the week commencing 12 October 2026 (details of location will be shared in advance)

What You Will Do

• Lead the preparation, support, operation, and maintenance of physical and virtual infrastructure in line with organisational standards, service requirements, and KPIs across the product lifecycle.
• Lead and co-ordinate infrastructure operations activities to ensure services meet business needs, performance targets, security requirements, and operational commitments.
• Provide day-to-day technical leadership and direction to infrastructure operations engineers and other technical specialists, managing workload, priorities, capability development, and service quality.
• Maintain secure configuration, accurate information, and effective control of IT assets across one or more infrastructure domains, ensuring compliance with policy and operational standards.
• Oversee infrastructure and application service monitoring, ensuring alerts, incidents, risks, and service issues are responded to appropriately to maintain availability, capacity, and performance.
• Lead and support the investigation of recurring, major, or complex incidents and problems, ensuring root causes are understood and preventive or corrective actions are implemented.
• Manage operational input into projects, programmes, and service changes, ensuring infrastructure requirements, support models, supportability, resilience, and operational readiness are considered from the outset.
• Manage third-party support and service provision in relevant areas, ensuring suppliers meet contractual obligations, service levels, regulatory requirements, and organisational expectations.
• Lead continual service improvement activities by identifying inefficiencies, risks, or service weaknesses and implementing or overseeing optimisation initiatives.
• Ensure operational processes, technical procedures, and support documentation are maintained to an appropriate standard and are fit for effective live service support.
• Engage with users, stakeholders, and service owners to understand operational needs, interpret service data, and drive service improvement and informed decision-making.
• Manage delegated operational budgets and supplier spend in relevant areas, ensuring services are delivered within agreed funding, expenditure is forecast and monitored appropriately, and value for money is achieved.
• Undertake health and safety duties and responsibilities appropriate to the post.
• Be committed to Natural Resources Wales Equal Opportunities and Diversity Policy, together with an understanding of how it operates within the responsibilities of the post.
• Be committed to your own development and that of your staff through the effective use of your personal development plan (known as Sgwrs).
• Required to take part in incident response activities.
• Any other reasonable duties requested commensurate with the grade of this role.