Job Description
Position Details
Professional Services
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK
Full time starting salary is normally in the range £47,389 to £56,535 with potential progression once in post to £63,606
Grade: 8
Full Time, Fixed Term contract up to December 2028
Closing date: 26th October 2026
Our offer to you
People are at the heart of what we are and do.
The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.
We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.
We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.
Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.
The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.
Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham
Background
The University of Birmingham is a global institution working within a diverse and vibrant City, offering an inspiring education to our students, and undertaking critically important research. We are a place of open, critical thinking, and the creation, sharing and dissemination of knowledge. Professional Services put students at the heart of all they do and enable an exceptional educational experience. They provide outstanding support to our researchers and help the University to grow its influence regionally, nationally, and globally. They ensure the University’s resources are used wisely, manage and improve the infrastructure which sits at the heart of the institution, and support decisions to be made quickly and based on sound evidence. Our Birmingham Professional programme operates across the University, supporting colleagues to network and collaborate, offering opportunities to learn and develop, contributing to the delivery of the University’s objectives, and helping everyone to understand the broader context within which we work.
Department Overview
The role of IT Services is to ensure that the University of Birmingham community has access to responsive, resilient, secure and accessible systems and support. Our technologies enable our students, staff, researchers, visitors, and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology, and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research, or work. IT Services are building a culture of innovation, collaboration, openness, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. Our IT Services division has an active People and Culture network and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events for colleagues. With a new Digital Strategy, this is an exciting opportunity to join the team making IT happen at the University of Birmingham.
Role Summary
This is an opportunity to take ownership of specialist research infrastructure that supports innovative academic work within the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, focussing on the UK Rail Research and Innovation Network within the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education.
We are looking for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to lead the operational management, improvement and future planning of a dedicated virtualisation and storage platform used to deliver services to research projects. This is a role for someone who enjoys combining hands-on technical delivery, practical problem-solving, and close collaboration with academic colleagues.
You will inherit an established environment that is already delivering value, and your role will be to keep it running reliably, guide it through essential upgrades and renewal, reduce risk, improve documentation, and help shape what comes next. You will work with a high degree of autonomy, while drawing on support from colleagues where needed.
This role would suit someone who is confident taking ownership of live infrastructure, comfortable working across technical and stakeholder boundaries, and motivated by the chance to support research that makes a real difference.
Main Duties
- Take technical ownership of a dedicated research infrastructure platform, providing strategic direction and expert leadership for the development of virtual machines, storage, and related services that support academic research.
- Ensure the platform remains secure, stable, well-maintained and fit for purpose in support of live research activity.
- Plan and deliver essential upgrades, lifecycle activities and service improvements with minimal disruption to existing deployments.
- Manage day-to-day operation of the environment, including performance, capacity, resilience, availability and incident resolution.
- Maintain and support existing research deployments, working with academic users to understand operational needs and respond to issues effectively.
- Work with academic colleagues to understand new requirements and translate them into practical, reliable and supportable technical solutions.
- Lead or coordinate the procurement and replacement of infrastructure hardware, ensuring continuity, compatibility and value for money.
- Identify security risks, vulnerabilities and service weaknesses, and implement proportionate mitigations and improvements.
- Produce and maintain clear technical documentation covering current architecture, operational procedures, known issues and support arrangements.
- Contribute to service planning and decision-making around the future direction of the platform, including sustainability, support models and technical options.
- Work independently and use sound judgement when making changes to production services, escalating or seeking specialist support where appropriate.
- Collaborate with colleagues across IT and research support teams to ensure the platform aligns with wider University standards, policies and ways of working.
- Ensure appropriate backup, recovery and disaster recovery arrangements are in place and regularly reviewed.
- Act as technical authority for changes to the platform, following agreed change and risk management processes.
- Engage with external suppliers and vendors for support, escalation, maintenance and roadmap discussions.
- Where appropriate, improve operational efficiency through automation, scripting or Standardisation.
- Ensure platform operation aligns with relevant data protection, information governance and compliance requirements.
- Participate in incident review and continuous service improvement activities.
- Take technical ownership of the virtual machine and operating system layer, including build standards, configuration, patching and lifecycle management for Linux-based research workloads (predominantly Ubuntu Server).
- Maintain and support research service components deployed within virtual machines, including databases, containerised services and supporting middleware.
- Work with academic users to support application‑level operational needs, including performance, availability, data handling and integration with wider infrastructure or cloud services.
- Support secure integration with cloud platforms (Azure and AWS) where appropriate, including hybrid deployments and access to third-party research services.
- Ensure appropriate handling of sensitive, personal, or commercially confidential research data, in line with GDPR, data protection legislation and institutional governance requirements.
- Identify opportunities to improve platform reliability, repeatability and operational efficiency through standardised VM builds, configuration practices, automation and scripting.
- Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour in line with university policies.
- Other relevant criteria from our equality and diversity duties document.
- Any other duties commensurate with the grade.
Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience
- Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical role in a relevant area. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.
- Substantial experience supporting and administering enterprise virtualised infrastructure in production environments, delivering virtual machines, storage and related services.
- Strong practical understanding of virtualisation platforms, storage, infrastructure lifecycle management, patching, upgrades and hardware replacement.
- Experience of end-to-end service ownership, including operational support, troubleshooting, documentation, security risk management and continuous improvement.
- Ability to plan and deliver change safely in live research environments, with careful attention to continuity, risk and user impact.
- Strong understanding of infrastructure security principles, operational risk and proportionate mitigations.
- Experience working directly with users or stakeholders to gather requirements and deliver practical, supportable technical solutions.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical matters clearly to non‑specialist colleagues.
- Proven ability to work independently, investigate issues methodically and make sound technical decisions with minimal supervision.
- Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact protected groups and take appropriate action.
- Other relevant criteria from our equality and diversity knowledge, skills and experience document.
Desirable Knowledge And Experience
The following would be highly desirable but not essential.
Infrastructure & Virtualisation
- VMware‑based environments, including vSphere, vCenter and vSAN.
- Experience with backup and recovery platforms such as Veeam.
- Knowledge of converged or integrated infrastructure platforms (e.g. Dell VxRail or equivalent).
- Enterprise networking and security technologies, including Aruba networking and Fortinet (FortiGate) firewalls, or comparable platforms.
Operating Systems & Configuration
- Linux server administration, particularly Ubuntu Server, including system hardening, patching and performance tuning.
- Experience supporting or administering PostgreSQL or similar databases.
- Familiarity with container technologies such as Docker.
- Entry‑level to intermediate Python scripting, particularly in operational, automation or data‑driven research contexts (e.g. Django, ML‑related workloads).
Cloud & Data
- Practical experience with Azure and/or AWS, including hybrid integration with on‑premise infrastructure.
- Understanding of data sharing, GDPR, and governance considerations for research data, including handling commercially sensitive information.
- Experience supporting research computing, data platforms or services used in academic or research environments.
Role context
Roles at this level will either be technical specialists operating at a very high specialist level as expert contributors or experienced functional/technical professionals with a broader knowledge across their discipline with managerial responsibility for the delivery or ownership of a service.
Core Competencies/transferable Skills
Working at this level you will be able to develop and successfully demonstrate the core competencies/transferable skills outlined in each of the areas shown below. You will be expected to take ownership for getting things done, including calling on or joining others to assist. You will be expected to be flexible as required in supporting your department and wider University.
Planning and organising
- Lead and manage a technical/IT/specialist team to deliver a service, balancing short term delivery with longer term planning horizons;
- Determine priorities and allocate resources to meet planned objectives and requirements;
- Monitor performance standards, taking appropriate actions to ensure service delivery is uniformly excellent
- Ensure health and safety of the area and equipment/hardware;
- Carry out project work including planning and delivering programmes of work to budget and deadline;
- Advise on future requirements of, for example, equipment, apparatus, furniture and fittings, space;
- Make a major contribution to the development of policies and procedures to ensure that all legislative and University requirements are met within the laboratories/workshops and work areas.
or
- Make significant contributions to the design/development/application of services, techniques, specialist equipment or materials;
- Design, plan and deliver programmes of specialist work;
- Operate as a high level specialist – initiating and developing ideas/approaches, promoting and delivering innovative solutions.
Problem solving and decision making
- Use analytical and problem solving skills to resolve specialist and technical issues; may be one of the few able to provide solutions in a specialised field;
- Provide comprehensive advice and make innovative contributions.
Organisational understanding
- Has an excellent understanding of own working area and a broad understanding of the contribution other areas make to the success of the University;
- Has an excellent understanding of how the University operates, together with an understanding of how academia operates in the UK;
- Demonstrates empathy with the academic endeavour and seeks to encourage others to do so.
Relationships and communication
- Communicate clearly on technical or professional issues to non-specialists and senior level audiences and command their respect;
- Represent the department at internal and external meetings/events/network with colleagues in other institutions to share best practice.
Informal enquiries to Rashid Ravat, email:
[email protected]View our staff values and behaviours here
Use of AI in applications: We want to understand your genuine interest in the role and for the written elements of your application to accurately reflect your own communication style. Applications that rely too heavily on AI tools can appear generic and lack the detail we need to assess your skills and experience. Such applications will unlikely be progressed to interview.
We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website .