The role

We’re looking for a Technical Manager will take ownership and evolving ‘The Sheds’ platform, bringing structure, clarity, and control to a complex environment spanning cluster infrastructure, networks, and backend services. You will lead a focused platform stabilisation effort, identifying technical risks, rationalising assets, and establishing clear ownership, dependencies, and operational standards across the platform. This includes addressing single points of failure, improving resilience, and coordinating specialist input across multiple domains including AV, networking, and compute.

Beyond initial stabilisation, you will drive ongoing platform delivery and governance, shaping how work is prioritised, sequenced, and executed. You will define and run structured intervention projects, implement robust intake and triage processes, and ensure all changes are delivered in a controlled and repeatable way. Working closely with stakeholders across ITS and the wider university, you will ensure platform changes are adopted smoothly, while embedding strong engineering practices, clear documentation, and continuous improvement into the core of the platform.

What will you be doing?

• You will take ownership of the HPC platform and associated backend services, leading a small core engineering team while coordinating specialist input from audio-visual, networking and academic stakeholders. The role will not directly own all adjacent services but will need to work closely with those teams where platform delivery depends on them.
• Your initial focus will be to stabilise the platform, clarify ownership, reduce technical risk, and establish clear operating standards across infrastructure, services and environments.
• You will drive the ongoing evolution of the platform, shaping and prioritising a pipeline of improvement work, and delivering targeted interventions to enhance resilience, performance, and usability. This includes working closely with academics and technical teams to ensure the platform meets real research and teaching needs, while enforcing a disciplined approach to change, delivery, and documentation.
• Alongside this, you will provide strong technical leadership — setting direction, defining standards, and supporting engineers to deliver high-quality outcomes. You will be comfortable operating at both a strategic and hands-on level, stepping into detail when needed, but maintaining a clear view of how the platform develops over time.