Role Overview: Infrastructure Design Lead Contract Duration: 6 Months (Inside IR35)
Location: London, UK (100% On-site / 5 Days per Week)
Security Clearance: Active DV (Developed Vetting) Clearance is mandatory
Position Summary We are seeking an experienced Infrastructure Design Lead to direct a team of infrastructure engineers in architecting, deploying, and optimizing robust enterprise-grade environments. In this role, you will act as the technical authority across compute, storage, networking, automation, and virtualization platforms.
You will be responsible for translating high-level business objectives into resilient, secure, and scalable technical solutions, ensuring all architectural blueprints comply with rigorous government security frameworks and long-term IT roadmaps. This is a hands-on technical leadership position balancing end-to-end design governance, operational delivery, and team mentorship.
Key Responsibilities Architectural Governance & Technical Authority: Lead the end-to-end authoring, validation, and review of robust High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs) for high-stakes, mission-critical services.
Requirements Translation: Bridge the gap between non-technical stakeholders and engineering teams by converting operational and business needs into actionable infrastructure architecture.
Security & Compliance Standards: Embed security-by-design principles into all architectural stages, ensuring strict adherence to NIST, CIS benchmarks, and relevant national security baselines.
Hands-on Team Leadership: Steer multidisciplinary engineering squads through complex delivery cycles, operational troubleshooting, and infrastructure modernization projects.
Enterprise Resilience Strategy: Formulate blueprints that guarantee high availability, rapid service recoverability, and comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities across hybrid and on-premises footprints.
Candidate Profile & Technical Capabilities Design & Core Architecture Principles
Proven background functioning as a Design Authority / Technical Lead in secure, mission-critical enterprise environments.
Deep mastery of resilient design concepts: Fault Tolerance, High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), Capacity Planning, Elastic Scaling (horizontal/vertical), and Resilience Engineering.
Practical knowledge of NIST and CIS security control implementations.
Core Infrastructure & Virtualization
Advanced design and deployment expertise with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and modern enterprise virtualization suites.
Strong background across bare-metal server hardware and enterprise OS platforms ( Windows Server and Linux distributions such as RHEL , Rocky Linux , or Ubuntu ).
Storage, Protection & Networking
Design proficiency with enterprise SAN/NAS storage arrays (e.g., Dell PowerStore , NetApp ).
Architecting modern backup, deduplication, and recovery solutions (e.g., Veeam , Cohesity , or Veritas NetBackup ).
Solid grasp of core data-centre networking, including Layer 2/3 routing, switching topologies, and firewall boundary protections.
Automation & Observability
Practical automation and configuration management skills using Ansible , PowerShell , or Bash .
Experience implementing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring, telemetry, and observability frameworks.
Randstad Technologies is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.