Senior IT Infrastructure Lead

Full Job Description: Senior IT Infrastructure Lead

(May to need be accessed via Desktop or our Careers website: https://www.ardent-management.com/current-vacancies)

Role: Senior IT Infrastructure Lead

📍 Location: Birmingham

⏰ Full Time - Permanent

🏢 Division: Digital

💼 Salary: Competitive

About Us:

Ardent is the UK’s leading provider of land, consent management, and stakeholder engagement services, supporting major infrastructure and regeneration projects from concept to delivery. We are passionate about delivering life-improving change for communities and future generations.

Role Purpose:

As a Senior IT Infrastructure Lead, the role will involve owning and managing Ardent's technology infrastructure and ensuring the seamless operation of our co-managed toolset. You will act as the technical gatekeeper for changes, approve or reject MSP-proposed changes, and verify MSP performance on the toolset. The role requires you to manage vendor and licensing relationships and ensure the security, resilience, and scalability of infrastructure services. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and continually improving enterprise infrastructure platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, virtual environments, storage, servers, and network services.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technical Authority: Act as Ardent’s senior internal technical authority for infrastructure, cloud, identity, security, networking, backup, disaster recovery, and core technology services.
• Infrastructure Management: Design, implement, manage, support, and continually improve enterprise infrastructure platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, virtual environments, storage, servers, network services, and cloud resources.
• Security & Resilience: Ensure infrastructure services remain secure, resilient, scalable, supportable, and aligned to business requirements, technical standards, and future-state architecture principles.
• Lifecycle & Planning: Own and maintain infrastructure lifecycle plans, technology refresh roadmaps, capacity planning, storage and licence forecasting, and annual infrastructure budget inputs.
• Microsoft 365 & Identity: Act as technical owner for Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, licensing optimisation, and service configuration standards. Administer and govern Entra ID, Active Directory, Conditional Access, MFA, role-based access controls, identity governance, privileged access, and identity security controls.
• Co-Managed Platforms: Hold, safeguard, and periodically test Ardent’s top-level administrative access to co-managed platforms. Verify MSP performance and manage vendor and licensing relationships.
• Network Management: Manage firewalls, network infrastructure, secure connectivity, SD-WAN, VPN, Wi-Fi, WAN services, DNS changes, and network monitoring. Troubleshoot complex network issues and review proposed network changes.
• Backup & Recovery: Own backup, recovery, and disaster recovery arrangements, including backup monitoring, restore testing, DR documentation, RPO/RTO targets, recovery procedures, technical runbooks, and business continuity testing support.
• Incident Management: Act as the highest internal technical escalation point for complex incidents, major incidents, problem investigations, and supplier escalations. Lead P1 incidents and security incidents, coordinating internal teams, MSP resources, vendors, and independent security support.
• Supplier & Vendor Management: Provide technical oversight of MSPs, vendors, and third-party suppliers, including validation of technical recommendations and review of contractual performance. Manage toolset vendor relationships and licensing activity.