IT Infrastructure Principal Engineer

About the role

The IT Infrastructure Principal Engineer oversees and manages the organisation's physical IT infrastructure, including new infrastructure projects and ongoing upgrades. The role ensures the reliability, security, performance and efficiency of servers, storage, networks, data centres and other critical on-premises infrastructure, and leads the UNIX/Linux and middleware team.

Key responsibilities

• Lead administration, support and maintenance of RHEL-based Linux infrastructure and enterprise middleware (IBM MQ, IBM Connect:Direct, Axway, LDAP) across Production, UAT and Development environments.
• Drive the Solaris-to-RHEL migration programme, decommissioning legacy Solaris platforms and adopting RHEL as the strategic OS.
• Ensure platform availability, performance, security and compliance through monitoring, capacity planning, patch management, vulnerability remediation and middleware upgrades.
• Act as technical lead and escalation point for critical incidents, working with Application, Network, Database, Security and Cloud teams.
• Lead disaster recovery, business continuity, automation and operational excellence; set infrastructure standards, governance, KPIs, SLAs and best practices.
• Lead and mentor the UNIX/Linux and Middleware team, manage performance, career development and succession planning.
• Oversee incident, problem, change, release and capacity management, and manage resource planning, workload prioritisation, vendor engagement and 24x7 support.
• Drive patch management, vulnerability remediation and security hardening, and review remediation plans for security findings.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, audit, risk and internal security requirements, and work with Cyber Security, Risk, Audit and Compliance teams.
• Oversee monitoring, health checks, performance tuning and capacity planning, and validate high availability, DR, backup, recovery testing and clustering solutions.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science or a related field.
• Minimum 10 years of infrastructure operations experience, including at least 5 years in mission-critical Banking or Financial Services environments.
• Minimum 3-5 years of leadership experience managing Infrastructure or Middleware teams in a 24x7 production support environment.
• Proven experience leading RHEL Linux infrastructure and enterprise middleware platforms.
• Strong stakeholder, vendor, incident and service delivery management experience.

Required skills

• Hands-on RHEL administration, troubleshooting, performance tuning, security hardening, patch management and automation.
• Working knowledge of Solaris and experience with IBM MQ, IBM Connect:Direct, Axway SecureTransport and LDAP.
• Experience in large-scale infrastructure transformation, platform modernisation and migration projects.
• Understanding of security controls, vulnerability management, regulatory compliance and audit requirements.
• Preferred: RHCE or RHCSA, ITIL Foundation, IBM MQ Administration, Red Hat Ansible Automation certifications; cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, OpenShift) are an added advantage.