Description

What’s the role about?

Here at the John Lewis Partnership we have a bold and ambitious IT team. We support our business by providing industry-leading technology solutions that cater for our customer needs whenever and wherever they are, continually driving innovation, transforming our infrastructure and delivering new and unique ways of shopping. Our mission is to delight customers at every opportunity and to maintain our reputation as the best retailer in the country.

We now have a fantastic and exciting opportunity within our IT team - a rare opportunity to join us as an Infrastructure Lead Partner and to advance several key Platform towers including private and public cloud, hosting and automation solutions. We are seeking an experienced, dynamic, and proactive individual to lead these technology towers and to deliver secure, robust, stable and performant solutions.

If you’re passionate about infrastructure, if you thrive and perform in a fast-paced, high-demand environment, and if you take satisfaction in driving results through others, then we want to hear from you!

What you’ll be doing as an Infrastructure Lead:

You will be working as part of a larger team covering a spectrum of technologies in a modern hybrid enterprise environment where large interdependencies make up a successful infrastructure capability. You will drive and be accountable for the outcomes the business requires in relation to your specific services. This means that you will be working effectively with Partners and our strategic third party service providers to ensure successful delivery of the service strategy whilst managing operational risk throughout.

Why do our Infrastructure Leads love working for us?

"Working for the John Lewis Partnership gives me an enormous sense of pride. I feel like I’m part of something big - helping the company deliver enormous change that not only benefits our customers but the planet as a whole. We have a fantastic team culture, a can-do attitude and the role is both challenging and rewarding. I’m continually learning and improving, and enjoying the aspects of an ever-changing IT landscape!” - Paul Hallett - Infrastructure Lead Partner.

Key Responsibilities include:

Developing working relationships with key business stakeholders and building understanding of the commercial, technical and operational landscape and business strategy.

Deliver value for John Lewis partnership by driving quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness from all infrastructure management contracts. Manage suppliers and vendors to ensure Infrastructure remains secure, stable, robust and performant.

Ensure that the service provided by vendors and managed service suppliers deliver against agreed SLAs, key metrics, and statements of work.

Using your knowledge of the end to end hosting services and an understanding of its consumption by the business to develop a forecast of demand for the service and (by extension) the vendor’s services. You will be influencing decisions in relation to the vendor and provisioning of service.

Working with Architecture to ensure deliverables are aligned with the business and technical strategy, producing business cases to deliver change and innovation.

Ensure full life cycle management is planned, managed and delivered across the infrastructure estate; with published and managed road-maps.

Being the authoritative point of escalation for your technology towers.

What you’ll have:

• Demonstrable experience of leading managed service providers in a complex enterprise IT environment in addition to definition of SLAs, KPI, and innovation targets.

• Proven experience of managing high value third party contracts and having budgetary management skills, understanding of contract penalties and experience with service renewals and supporting processes. 

• A comprehensive knowledge of modern Hosted Service principles, along with proven experience of how these technologies support an enterprise business. 

Technical experience and skills in some or all of the following areas:

• Enterprise Automation - e.g VMware Automation & Orchestration

• DevOps tools - e.g Docker, Ansible Tower, Jenkins, Nexus, Bitbucket, Chocolatey

• Cloud infrastructures and the concept of Software Defined Data Centres

• Google Cloud / AWS Platforms -  Terraform, Gitlab, Kubernetes.

• AIX/Linux technologies including IBM Power (VIO, HMC, LPARs), x86 virtualisation, various flavours of linux such as Red Hat, SUSE, OEL and open source distributions

• The ability to work under pressure in a fast paced environment, with outstanding problem-solving skills, an analytical mind and demonstrate a strong attention to detail.

What else you could bring:

• A degree in Computer Science, IT, Systems Engineering or a related qualification

• Experience working with a hybrid cloud presentation comprising large elements of on-premise and public cloud workloads

• An understanding of Agile and DevOps practices and methodologies (Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban, CI/CD).

• Experience in the retail sector, both physical and online.

Additional Information:

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event that we receive a high volume of applications. Therefore we recommend you apply as soon as possible. The application form consists of a CV upload, an online test followed by application questions.

Please ensure you refresh the page each time you complete a task to ensure you complete everything that you need to in time. We have a number of different ways to work flexibly so at your interview feel free to talk about what flexibility means to you. There are no guarantees, however, it may open the door to not only a new role but a new way of working.