Senior Lead Associate - Hosting

The Hosting Level 3 Engineer/Senior Lead Associate - Hosting drives the strategic uplift of hosting services through the elimination of technical and operational debt, establishment of robust governance and control frameworks, and delivery of enterprise Operational Hygiene objectives. The role focuses on improving service maturity, audit readiness, risk posture, documentation quality, and control effectiveness through structured remediation and continuous improvement initiatives. Acting as a catalyst for service optimisation and operational excellence, the role delivers sustainable, measurable improvements to the hosting estate and its supporting governance model, independent of day-to-day operational service delivery

Key Responsibilities

Responsibilities & Duties*

Hosting Operational Hygiene delivery

• Conduct comprehensive assessments of hosting service documentation, operational artefacts, and knowledge assets to identify gaps, inconsistencies, and improvement opportunities, delivering enhanced standards, operating models, process documentation, dependency mapping, and service support frameworks.
• Drive the standardisation and optimisation of operational procedures and knowledge management practices, establishing consistent execution models that improve service quality, governance, and operational maturity.
• Lead targeted technical debt reduction initiatives focused on eliminating accumulated patching debt, reducing long-term vulnerability exposure, and improving platform security posture outside of routine operational maintenance activities.
• Assess and remediate configuration management deficiencies, including configuration drift, legacy standards, policy inconsistencies, insecure settings, and technical control weaknesses.
• Develop and deliver lifecycle modernisation initiatives that address technology obsolescence through the planned uplift, replacement, or retirement of end-of-life and end-of-support infrastructure components.
• Improve asset governance and estate visibility by identifying ownership gaps, classification inaccuracies, unmanaged assets, and CMDB integrity issues, delivering sustainable improvements in configuration management practices.
• Enhance monitoring and observability capabilities by identifying service visibility gaps, refining alerting strategies, improving signal quality, and introducing meaningful service-health metrics and operational insights.
• Drive automation and orchestration opportunities that reduce operational complexity, improve consistency, and minimise recurring manual intervention through engineering-led improvements.
• Lead infrastructure optimisation initiatives focused on capacity modelling, performance improvement, resource rationalisation, and sustainable platform scalability.
• Deliver security posture improvement programmes by identifying and remediating infrastructure control weaknesses through hardening, segmentation, control enhancement, and remediation activities arising from audit, assurance, and risk-management outcomes

Documentation and First Line of Defence cyber controls

• Conduct structured reviews of hosting governance artefacts, including policies, standards, control frameworks, procedures, and assurance evidence, identifying opportunities to improve clarity, consistency, effectiveness, and audit readiness.
• Design, define, and document operational and cyber-control frameworks required for effective First Line of Defence execution across the hosting estate, ensuring alignment with risk, governance, compliance, and assurance requirements.
• Establish comprehensive control operating models, including control objectives, scope, ownership, execution methodology, operating cadence, evidence requirements, exception management processes, and escalation pathways.
• Implement sustainable evidence management and assurance practices that enable control effectiveness to be consistently demonstrated to Risk, Cyber Security, Internal Audit, and external assurance stakeholders.
• Ensure defined controls are operationally viable, measurable, and fully embedded within service ownership frameworks before transition into steady-state operational governance

Leadership and stakeholder management

• Partner with Service Ownership, Architecture, Cyber Security, Risk, Internal Audit, Change Management, and platform engineering teams to define target-state operating standards, control frameworks, governance requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Govern the delivery of Operational Hygiene initiatives through appropriate change and risk management frameworks, ensuring improvements are transitioned only when target outcomes, documentation, controls, ownership models, and evidential requirements have been formally accepted.
• Champion standardisation, automation, technical debt reduction, preventative controls, and continuous service improvement initiatives that improve service maturity, reduce operational risk, and minimise future demand on operational support teams.

Experience & Education*

Demonstrable experience leading infrastructure service-improvement, technical-debt remediation or Operational Hygiene programmes.

Experience converting broad technical risks into prioritised, measurable improvement initiatives with clear completion evidence.

Experience managing cross-functional technical delivery across hosting, architecture, cyber security, change and service ownership.

Strong track record of eliminating patch, vulnerability, configuration, lifecycle, asset, monitoring, automation, capacity, performance and documentation debt.

Demonstrable experience reviewing and improving technical documentation and knowledge articles to strengthen and standardise operating procedures, enable consistent execution and improve operational effectiveness.

Experience implementing controlled changes and transitioning completed improvements to service owners.

Ability to establish delivery governance, manage dependencies and communicate outcomes to technical and senior stakeholders.

Experience defining measures that evidence risk reduction, reduction in manual effort and improvement in service manageability or supportability.

Operational Hygiene and service improvement

Technical-debt identification, prioritisation and remediation planning.

Outcome definition, benefits tracking and evidence-based closure.

Automation and removal of recurring manual operational effort.

Problem elimination and systemic root-cause remediation.

Hosting technology

Windows Server and Linux platforms.

VMware vSphere / ESXi and Hyper-V.

SAN/NAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, storage zoning and LUN provisioning.

Hosting monitoring, observability, configuration management and CMDB practices.

Infrastructure security hardening, vulnerability remediation and lifecycle management.

Leadership and control

Improvement backlog management, prioritisation and delivery governance.

Change control, risk management, stakeholder communication and acceptance criteria.

Engineering standards, technical documentation and dependency mapping.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Essential requirement (non-negotiable)

Candidate must have:

• Proven leadership of infrastructure Operational Hygiene or service-improvement delivery
• Advanced knowledge of VMware vSphere / ESXi and Windows Server and/or Linux hosting environments.
• Strong knowledge of storage, virtualisation, configuration, monitoring and infrastructure lifecycle practices.
• Demonstrable experience removing accumulated patch, vulnerability, configuration and technology-lifecycle debt.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure security controls, hardening standards and audit remediation.
• Proven ability to automate or permanently remove recurring manual operational activity.
• Ability to define measurable target conditions and produce evidence of completed improvement outcomes.
• Experience delivering controlled technical change and handing completed improvements to service owners.
• Clear evidence of distinguishing project-based improvement work from live events, recurring operational activity and individual requests.