Director, Cloud & Infrastructure

About the Role

Our client, a large and highly complex organisation operating within a mission-critical and regulated environment, is seeking a senior technology leader to head its Cloud & Infrastructure function.

Reporting to the Chief Infrastructure & Operations Officer, this newly created position will oversee a substantial organisation of approximately 500–600 employees and will be responsible for the end-to-end strategy, engineering, transformation and operations of enterprise cloud and infrastructure platforms.

This newly created position will oversee a substantial organisation of approximately 500–600 employees and will be responsible for the end-to-end strategy, engineering, transformation and operations of enterprise cloud and infrastructure platforms.

This is not a traditional infrastructure operations role. The successful candidate will be expected to define the organisation's long-term infrastructure strategy, lead large-scale cloud and infrastructure transformation, and ensure the continued reliability, resilience and performance of critical production services.

The role requires a transformational leader who can think strategically, remain technically credible, and stay sufficiently close to execution to challenge teams, vendors and delivery partners.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud and Infrastructure Strategy

• Define and execute the long-term cloud and infrastructure strategy, roadmap and operating model.
• Establish clear investment priorities across cloud, hosting, infrastructure platforms, automation and service operations.
• Translate future business demand and technology trends into a practical three-to-five-year transformation roadmap.
• Develop the future technology, people and operating model required to support the organisation's longer-term growth.
• Drive measurable value realisation, productivity improvement and cost optimisation across infrastructure services.

Transformation and Modernisation

• Lead large-scale cloud, data centre and infrastructure transformation programmes.
• Drive cloud adoption, infrastructure modernisation, platform standardisation and enterprise migration initiatives.
• Establish reusable engineering patterns, platform guardrails and standardised service offerings.
• Promote self-service provisioning through Infrastructure-as-Code, policy-as-code and automation.
• Set the direction for platform engineering, SRE, observability and AIOps capabilities.
• Challenge established ways of working and drive a culture of continuous improvement and optimisation.

Infrastructure Engineering and Delivery

• Oversee the design and delivery of cloud landing zones, hybrid hosting platforms and foundational infrastructure.
• Ensure new platforms are scalable, secure, resilient and operationally ready.
• Define engineering standards, reference architectures and reusable infrastructure modules.
• Lead major data centre, cloud and workload migration programmes from planning through cutover and stabilisation.
• Ensure infrastructure delivery remains closely aligned with application, business and service requirements.

Production Operations and Reliability

• Maintain end-to-end accountability for the availability and performance of production infrastructure services.
• Own service reliability, SLOs, monitoring, incident management and post-incident improvement.
• Ensure transformation initiatives are delivered without compromising business-as-usual operations.
• Drive stronger operational automation, observability and intelligent monitoring practices.
• Lead teams through major service disruptions, infrastructure incidents and complex operational crises.

Resilience, Governance and Compliance

• Ensure disaster recovery, backup, business continuity and resilience capabilities are regularly tested and maintained.
• Embed security, compliance, privacy and data-residency requirements into infrastructure platforms by design.
• Establish operational-readiness gates for new platforms and deployments.
• Maintain strong governance across ITSM, change management, SLAs, OLAs and service operations.
• Ensure appropriate audit evidence, controls and regulatory requirements are consistently met.

Commercial, Cost and Vendor Management

• Drive FinOps, cloud consumption governance and infrastructure cost optimisation.
• Manage capacity, demand forecasting and infrastructure investment planning.
• Oversee strategic technology vendors, outsourcing partners and managed service providers.
• Establish strong commercial governance, service-level accountability and performance management.
• Ensure external partners deliver against agreed outcomes, security requirements and transformation objectives.

Leadership and Organisational Transformation

• Lead and develop a large, multi-disciplinary cloud and infrastructure organisation.
• Manage and empower established senior leaders across infrastructure, cloud delivery and cloud operations.
• Build future capabilities in cloud engineering, platform engineering, SRE, automation and service reliability.
• Lead workforce and skills transformation while continuing to maintain stable operations.
• Improve productivity and capability through better operating models, automation and optimisation rather than relying solely on additional headcount.
• Influence senior stakeholders across technology, business and external partner organisations.

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate should bring:

• At least 15 years of relevant experience across cloud, infrastructure engineering, transformation and operations.
• Significant leadership experience within a large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure environment.
• Proven experience leading enterprise-wide cloud or infrastructure transformation.
• Direct accountability for production infrastructure operations, service availability and reliability.
• Experience leading at least one major data centre, cloud or infrastructure migration involving complex planning, governance and cutover execution.
• Strong experience developing and executing long-term infrastructure strategies and transformation roadmaps.
• A strong understanding of hybrid cloud, enterprise hosting, platform engineering and modern infrastructure operating models.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code, policy-as-code, SRE, observability, AIOps and automation-driven operations.
• Experience managing large strategic vendors, outsourcing arrangements and managed service providers.
• Strong commercial awareness, including FinOps, cost governance, capacity planning and value realisation.
• Experience operating within a regulated, financial-services, healthcare, telecommunications or similarly complex environment.
• Demonstrated ability to lead organisational and mindset change while maintaining stable BAU operations.
• Strong executive stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to influence upwards, horizontally and through multiple layers of leadership.

Leadership Attributes

We are looking for a leader who is:

• Strategic and forward-looking, but also execution-oriented.
• Technically credible and able to engage meaningfully with engineering and operations teams.
• Comfortable operating within complex, high-pressure and highly visible environments.
• Able to empower experienced leaders rather than relying on command-and-control management.
• Resilient and decisive during major incidents, transformation challenges and difficult stakeholder situations.
• Curious, humble and able to learn a complex organisational and industry environment quickly.
• Motivated by transformation and continuous improvement rather than maintaining the status quo.
• Able to balance innovation, operational stability, regulatory requirements and cost efficiency.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

This is a rare opportunity to shape the future cloud and infrastructure strategy of a large organisation whose services have broad national and societal impact.

The successful candidate will inherit a mature operational environment and an experienced leadership team, while having the mandate to define and execute the next phase of infrastructure transformation at significant scale.

The role offers substantial leadership accountability, strategic influence and the opportunity to build infrastructure capabilities that will support the organisation's needs for many years to come.