Role Summary
We are a telecommunications provider operating carrier-grade, on-premise infrastructure across four interconnected sites. We maintain our own IP space through RIPE, operate our own ASN and deliver business-critical unified communications and telephony services.
We are looking for an Infrastructure Manager to take senior ownership of our entire network estate and lead the infrastructure team. This is a hands-on leadership role, responsible for network reliability, performance and resilience, as well as team management, operational governance and technical standards.
You will personally own the network, from BGP, RIPE and peering through to routers, switches and carrier relationships , while leading a team of two engineers.

The Environment
Carrier-grade, bare-metal infrastructure across four interconnected sites
Fibre ring topology with geographic resilience
Minimal public cloud usage
Business-critical telecoms and UC services
Growing infrastructure team requiring strong technical leadership

Key Responsibilities
Network Ownership
Own and operate the core IP network across all points of presence
Manage BGP within our ASN, including peering policy, prefix filtering, traffic engineering and failure recovery
Manage RIPE resources, IP allocations and routing policy
Maintain peering and interconnects including LONAP, LINX and private links
Configure and maintain MikroTik and Juniper routers and switches
Own carrier/provider relationships, escalations and service performance
Lead network-level incident response and post-incident RCA

Team Leadership
Directly manage two infrastructure engineers with full line management responsibility
Run regular 1:1s, stand-ups and operational reviews
Set priorities, workloads and team schedules
Manage holidays and ensure adequate operational cover
Conduct performance reviews and support professional development
Identify and reduce knowledge and capability single points of failure
Mentor engineers and build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement

Operational Governance
Own and enforce change management across infrastructure
Maintain incident, escalation and major incident procedures
Act as senior escalation point for P1 and P2 incidents
Drive post-incident reviews, RCA and corrective actions
Enforce standards for backups, patching, vulnerability remediation and access control
Oversee disaster recovery and failover testing

Documentation & Standards
Maintain accurate network diagrams, runbooks, SOPs and recovery documentation
Set documentation standards across the infrastructure team
Coordinate and sign off DR and failover testing
Provide senior support for managed customer networks, including Cisco, TP-Link Omada and DrayTek

Architecture & Collaboration
Work closely with DevOps and service teams on infrastructure strategy
Review and approve architecture proposals and business cases
Represent infrastructure operations in leadership meetings and, where required, present proposals to the board
Provide senior technical input into complex customer network projects and multi-site deployments

Southampton Production Site
Our Southampton office is a secondary production environment, hosting compute infrastructure alongside the business network. It is managed to data-centre standards and forms part of the wider infrastructure estate.

You will

Own the office network and ensure appropriate reliability, segmentation and resilience
Coordinate network work with the Head of Technical Services
Act as senior technical authority for network issues at the site
Support complex, high-value customer network deployments alongside technical and sales/solutions teams

Telecommunications Platforms
Support core telephony and UC platforms and maintain high availability
Lead operational stability and migration readiness across platform layers
Act as senior escalation point for platform incidents affecting service continuity

Performance Measures

Success will be measured against

Network uptime and agreed SLA targets
P1/P2 incident MTTR and restoration times
Change success rate and reduction in failed production changes
Completion and quality of critical documentation
Quality and timely closure of RCAs and corrective actions
Infrastructure team performance, development and operational discipline
An annual performance bonus is linked to network uptime and operational KPIs. Deductions apply only to outages or service-impacting incidents within the Infrastructure Manager's direct control; third-party provider failures, force majeure and demonstrably external factors are excluded.

Required Experience
Advanced IP networking within carrier, ISP or equivalent production environments
Deep hands-on BGP experience, including traffic engineering, redundancy and live incident recovery
Strong MikroTik RouterOS and Juniper Junos experience
RIPE resource management and IP administration
Proven people management and direct line management experience
Strong operational governance, change control and incident management experience
High standards of production documentation
Experience managing carriers and third-party network providers

Desirable
Telecoms, ISP or UC service provider experience
Operational experience with Proxmox, Docker or virtualisation
Experience mentoring junior/mid-level engineers
Experience introducing structured operational practices into a growing team

Working Style

We need someone who is

Hands-on, methodical and reliable in live production environments
Calm, decisive and accountable under pressure
Comfortable taking ownership and leading from the front
Collaborative across infrastructure, DevOps, service and development teams
Able to set high standards while supporting and developing their team

Working Hours
Nominally 08:30–17:30 , with flexibility expected at this senior level. Out-of-hours support is required on a planned and escalation basis.