Central Infrastructure Sme

**Central Infrastructure Subject Matter Expert**
**Location: Remote (UK)**
**Permanent**
RS Group is seeking a passionate and driven Central Infrastructure Subject Matter Expert to join our rapidly growing Technology team. This is a critical role focused on ensuring the reliability, availability, and evolution of our global infrastructure services. You’ll provide operational support and technical guidance to third-party partners, internal stakeholders, and suppliers—ensuring consistent delivery of infrastructure solutions that meet defined service levels and standards across the RS Group landscape.

**What You’ll Be Doing**:

- Accountability for configuration, performance and availability of infrastructure services executing on servers hosted in branch or cloud through 3rd party engagements.
- Accountability for all patch management change activity coordination and execution, on servers hosted in branch or cloud through 3rd party.
- Accountability of all RS Group branch and relevant cloud assets in CMDB; ensure 3rd Party maintain IPAM solution to RS Standards.
- Liaise with the engineering focussed RS Cloud Competency Centre, internal customers and project teams, Technology support teams and external service providers to ensure all branch and cloud infrastructure change activity is assessed.
- Assess request for change within Infrastructure platforms, ensuring activity is performed in line with best practise, has suitable test and reversion plans, and is expected to meet the requirement.
- Attend weekly Technical Change Boards to review change requests across multiple technologies, consider there cross-technology stack implications and advise on potential conflict.
- Manage business requests for support in line with Service Level Agreements.
- Support incident managers to seek resolutions across a diverse range of technologies and teams, leading where appropriate.
- Accountable for auditing branch & cloud-based development, test, and production infrastructure capacity.
- Review and assist in the development of documentation for solutions being transitioned into support.
- Input into the risk management process.
- Identify improvements to the RS infrastructure.
- Liaise with all Service Management teams to maintain effective systems maintenance and monitoring processes.
- Act as a lead Technical Expert to resolve technical issues.
- Manage issues impacting service delivery and define and implement effective solutions via the service improvement process.
- Deliver appropriate action plan to resolve incidents.
- Input and review branch and cloud infrastructure project lifecycle activities for acceptance into BAU production.
- Input into the branch and cloud platforms services lifecycle budget planning process.
- Deliver a program of continuous improvement via the service improvement plan.
- Review vulnerability reports and make recommendations around environment updates in line with requirements from RS security team and follow industry standard practises.
- Project: Perform role of technical lead for acceptance into service of projects, preceded by review and input to high
- and low-level designs, in various formats and levels of detail, to ensure solutions are a good fit with existing solution components.
- Proactively engage with both 3rd party service providers and internal support teams to maintain a positive working partnership.
- Manage 3rd party service providers and internal support teams to meet contracted support agreements.
- Maintain effective stakeholder relationships with Technology and Business community stakeholders.
- Communicate complex issues and recommendations in a format applicable to the audience.
- Review and challenge root cause analysis reports due to critical events. Activity participate in the sharing of Global Technology and Cloud best practice and processes across the RS Group.

**About You**:
You are a proactive, technically astute infrastructure expert who thrives in a complex and fast-paced global environment. With a hands-on understanding of both cloud and on-prem infrastructure, you’re adept at navigating operational challenges, leading technical initiatives, and delivering results through collaboration. Your ability to communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences makes you a valuable bridge between technology teams, business stakeholders, and vendors.

You take pride in driving service excellence and continuous improvement while keeping a strong focus on security, governance, and user experience.

**What You Bring**
- Proven expertise in hybrid infrastructure environments, integrating cloud and on-premise solutions.
- Strong experience with AWS and Azure platforms.
- In-depth technical knowledge of:

- Active Directory, MS Exchange
- Microsoft Server and RHEL OS
- Virtualisation (Hyper-V)
- IP networking (firewalls, switches, VPNs)
- Cloud monitoring and automation tools
- Enterprise server hardware
- Solid understanding of managing infrastructure i