Infrastructure Engineering Design Lead - Active DV Mandatory

This Infrastructure Engineering Design Lead role in London is a six-month contract, inside IR35, requiring active DV clearance and full-time on-site attendance five days per week. You will direct a team of infrastructure engineers in architecting, deploying and optimising enterprise-grade environments, acting as technical authority across compute, storage, networking, automation and virtualisation platforms. Responsibilities include leading the authoring, validation and review of High-Level and Low-Level Designs for mission-critical services, translating high-level business objectives into secure, scalable solutions compliant with government security frameworks, and providing team mentorship alongside operational delivery. The rate is £650 to £700 per day via umbrella.

Role Overview: Infrastructure Design Lead

• Contract Duration: 6 Months (Inside IR35)
• Location: London, UK (100% On-site / 5 Days per Week)
• Security Clearance: Active DV (Developed Vetting) Clearance is mandatory

Position Summary

We are seeking an experienced Infrastructure Design Lead to direct a team of infrastructure engineers in architecting, deploying, and optimizing robust enterprise-grade environments. In this role, you will act as the technical authority across compute, storage, networking, automation, and virtualization platforms.

You will be responsible for translating high-level business objectives into resilient, secure, and scalable technical solutions, ensuring all architectural blueprints comply with rigorous government security frameworks and long-term IT roadmaps. This is a hands-on technical leadership position balancing end-to-end design governance, operational delivery, and team mentorship.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Governance & Technical Authority: Lead the end-to-end authoring, validation, and review of robust High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs) for high-stakes, mission-critical services.
• Requirements Translation: Bridge the gap between non-technical stakeholders and engineering teams by converting operational and business needs into actionable infrastructure architecture.
• Security & Compliance Standards: Embed security-by-design principles into all architectural stages, ensuring strict adherence to NIST, CIS benchmarks, and relevant national security baselines.
• Hands-on Team Leadership: Steer multidisciplinary engineering squads through complex delivery cycles, operational troubleshooting, and infrastructure modernization projects.
• Enterprise Resilience Strategy: Formulate blueprints that guarantee high availability, rapid service recoverability, and comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities across hybrid and on-premises footprints.

Candidate Profile & Technical Capabilities

1. Design & Core Architecture Principles

• Proven background functioning as a Design Authority / Technical Lead in secure, mission-critical enterprise environments.
• Deep mastery of resilient design concepts: Fault Tolerance, High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), Capacity Planning, Elastic Scaling (horizontal/vertical), and Resilience Engineering.
• Practical knowledge of NIST and CIS security control implementations.

1. Core Infrastructure & Virtualization

• Advanced design and deployment expertise with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and modern enterprise virtualization suites.
• Strong background across bare-metal server hardware and enterprise OS platforms (Windows Server and Linux distributions such as RHEL, Rocky Linux, or Ubuntu).

1. Storage, Protection & Networking

• Design proficiency with enterprise SAN/NAS storage arrays (e.g., Dell PowerStore, NetApp).
• Architecting modern backup, deduplication, and recovery solutions (e.g., Veeam, Cohesity, or Veritas NetBackup).
• Solid grasp of core data-centre networking, including Layer 2/3 routing, switching topologies, and firewall boundary protections.

1. Automation & Observability

• Practical automation and configuration management skills using Ansible, PowerShell, or Bash.
• Experience implementing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring, telemetry, and observability frameworks.

Randstad Technologies is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.