Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Identity)

Derby; East Midlands; On-site; GBP 44,000 - 55,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous annual leave (38 days incl. B

Flexible working environment

Discounted onsite gym

Cycle to Work scheme

Job summary

The University of Derby is seeking a Servers, Storage and Identity Team Leader to drive identity modernization and hybrid cloud initiatives. You will lead a team delivering secure, scalable identity and access solutions using Microsoft Entra and Active Directory in a primarily on-site setting.

You will shape our identity roadmap, collaborate with HR, Information Security and service delivery, and implement automation to reduce manual work while improving security and user experience for students

Qualifications

• Significant experience delivering and supporting enterprise identity solutions in Microsoft cloud/hybrid environments.
• Proven ability to lead technical identity projects end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for identity, cloud and infrastructure services.
• Develop and execute a 2-year strategic roadmap for Entra-first identity architecture.
• Lead complex integrations between identity sources and services.
• Ensure security, disaster recovery and compliance across identity infrastructure.

Skills

Microsoft Entra ID

Active Directory

Hybrid identity

Zero Trust

PowerShell

Microsoft Graph APIs

Automation

Azure

Education

BSc in Computer Science or related discipline

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Terraform / Ansible

Job description

Servers, Storage and Identity Team Leader

£44,259 to £55,074 per annum (for exceptional performers, there is scope for further progression up to £63,335.10 per annum)

Onsite
This role will be based on site, primarily in the named location.

We have one simple promise – to make a positive impact. Through our ground-breaking research, teaching excellence and commitment to sustainable living, we are changing lives for the better.

The University of Derby is a modern university with a modern outlook. Everything we do is driven by delivering excellence and opportunities for our students, our staff and our region.

We have some of the best university facilities in the UK and achieve outstanding results for our teaching and research and have been awarded Gold in the prestigious Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023 – making it one of the top universities in the country recognised for its outstanding student experience and student outcomes.

Financially strong and seriously ambitious we offer our employees an inclusive culture that centres itself around staff wellbeing, where you can be confident you will receive all the help and encouragement you need to build a rewarding career with lots of opportunities to enhance your skills.

Digital Solutions & Services are responsible for providing the digital platform to enable the best possible service to staff, students and stakeholders across the University and beyond. We take a collaborative approach to developing strategic goals to provide a diverse range of information technology and business services designed to support learning, teaching and research at the University of Derby.

Digital Solutions & Services are responsible for ensuring that the University’s IT capability is fit for purpose, future focused and able to protect, support and enhance the full breadth of services that will be delivered either on campus or digitally online with contributions across the department. We aim to assist students, teaching staff, support departments and collaborative partners to ensure we are making an impact on the University’s current and future digital landscape.

As Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Identity), you will take a leading technical role in transforming the University’s identity and access services, helping us move from traditional on-premises Active Directory and synchronisation-based identity towards a modern, cloud-native Microsoft Entra-first architecture.

You will help define and deliver our identity roadmap, developing secure and resilient services built around Zero Trust, passwordless authentication, identity governance and automated identity lifecycle management. Working with HR, Information Security, application owners and Service Delivery, you will help modernise how identities are created, managed, governed and secured across the University.

The role has a strong focus on Microsoft Entra ID and Entra ID Governance, Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, Microsoft Graph and automation, alongside the Azure and hybrid infrastructure that supports these services. You will also help develop API-based integration with authoritative HR and student identity sources, reducing manual processes and our dependency on legacy identity infrastructure.

This is a 2-year fixed-term transformation opportunity with the chance to make a significant and lasting impact on the University’s technology landscape. You will lead and support key projects that improve security, simplify the experience for students and staff, increase automation and establish the identity foundations needed to support the University’s future digital services.

The ideal candidate will have significant experience of delivering and supporting enterprise identity solutions within Microsoft cloud and hybrid environments. You will have a passion for modernising identity services and a desire to take established, often complex identity processes and transform them into secure, automated and cloud-native services.

You will be comfortable taking technical leadership of identity solutions, helping shape our journey from traditional Active Directory and synchronisation-based identity towards an Entra-first, Zero Trust approach. You will combine strong technical knowledge with the ability to work across teams, solve complex problems and turn strategic direction into practical solutions that improve security and the experience of our students and staff.

You will bring a range of identity, cloud and automation skills such as (see job description for full role details):

• Significant experience administering and engineering Microsoft Entra ID and Active Directory, including hybrid identity and directory synchronisation.
• Strong knowledge of Conditional Access, authentication, Single Sign-On, role-based access control and privileged identity controls.
• Experience of Entra ID Governance, including Access Reviews, Entitlement Management, Lifecycle Workflows and Privileged Identity Management (PIM).
• Experience automating identity lifecycle and infrastructure services using PowerShell, Microsoft Graph APIs and workflows.
• Experience designing and delivering secure, resilient and scalable solutions across Azure and hybrid Microsoft environments.
• Experience integrating identity and access controls with applications, cloud services and authoritative data sources.
• An understanding of Zero Trust, identity security, privileged access, audit and logging, together with a drive to automate and continually improve services.

Most importantly, we are looking for someone who wants to help shape what identity at the University looks like in the future, not simply maintain what we have today.

• Responsible for leading key identity, cloud and supporting infrastructure services within the team:
• Provide service ownership and technical leadership for assigned identity and cloud infrastructure services, developing strategies, roadmaps and designs, implementing service improvements, maintaining documentation and ensuring effective service transition across internal teams.
• Develop and execute a 2-year strategic roadmap to transition from on-premises Active Directory reliance and Entra Connect sync mechanics toward an Entra-first, cloud-native identity and access management architecture.
• Undertake sector horizon scanning and benchmark identity and cloud services to ensure they remain secure, supportable and future focused.
• Produce and maintain architecture, design, configuration and operational documentation to support readiness, assurance, training, process development and the clear communication of technical standards.
• Define and promote technical standards for identity, authentication including the journey passwordless, and ZTNA, authorisation, cloud infrastructure, software and configuration management within the scope of the role.
• Ensure appropriate disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements are defined, documented and tested for assigned identity and infrastructure services.
• Identifying existing processes for the development of either new or improved automation
• Design and implement complex integrations and automation between authoritative identity data sources, Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365 and other University services.
• Work closely with other teams across the business to improve efficiency and adapt existing processes to enable a secure, smooth, and successful migration to a modern hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Lead key projects that may span the department and wider University, and have significant value, including identity modernisation and cloud infrastructure initiatives.
• Implement and mature Microsoft Entra ID Governance features, including Access Reviews, Entitlement Management, Lifecycle Workflows, and Privileged Identity Management (PIM).
• Responsible for ensuring monitoring of all services, including predicative and analytics and Entra identity protection telemetry is available for all services.

Information Security

• Maintain security of complex hybrid and cloud native systems through implementing secure strategies such as Conditional Access, Zero Trust access principles, and Entra Private Access, policies and controls and automating where possible.
• Lead or mentor others in the prioritisation and diagnosis of identity, access, cloud and infrastructure incidents in accordance with agreed procedures. Investigate causes, coordinate resolution and recovery, escalation where required, document outcomes and ensure lessons learned are applied.
• Initiates and monitors actions to investigate and resolve problems in systems, processes, and services. Determines problem fixes/remedies. Assists with the implementation of agreed remedies and preventative measures.
• Act as a third-line escalation point for highly complex identity, access, cloud and infrastructure issues and lead root cause analysis for assigned services.

Change Management

• Evaluates the impact of proposed or required changes which may be highly complex in nature (internally and by vendors) especially in the areas of hardware, software, performance, maintenance, and cost; provide recommendations to management with an impact assessment.

Relationships

• Work with team manager on managing external vendors and suppliers ensuring vendors are delivering on service and providing best value to the University.
• Work in a multidisciplinary team environment to deliver complex identity and cloud infrastructure solutions for multiple internal and external stakeholders.
• Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring across Cloud Infrastructure and Service Delivery, particularly in identity, access management and automation practices.
• BSc in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent substantial professional experience in an identity, cloud or infrastructure engineering role.

Experience

• Significant experience of implementing innovative solutions that are customer and future focused, particularly using Azure Cloud technologies and Microsoft Entra Suite.
• Significant experience administering and engineering Microsoft Entra ID and Active Directory, including hybrid identity, directory synchronisation, enterprise applications, single sign-on, role-based access control, Conditional Access and privileged identity controls.
• Strong background in designing and delivering enterprise identity and hybrid cloud solutions, including identity architecture, directory services, automation, Azure DevOps and infrastructure-as-code or configuration-management approaches such as Terraform and Ansible.

Skills, knowledge & abilities

• Strong configuration, secrets and change-management practices for identity and infrastructure services.
• Knowledge of application delivery and network services, for example, DNS, DHCP and IP address management.
• Understanding of project management lifecycle from conception through implementation.
• In-depth technical knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID and Governance, Active Directory, authentication and authorisation, identity lifecycle management, Windows Server and related application infrastructure technologies.

Business requirements

• Work as part of an on call out of hours rota.

Qualifications

• Relevant industry technical certification, for example Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate, Cybersecurity Architect Expert or Azure Administrator Associate.
• ITIL Foundation

Experience

• Experience of configuration-management and development lifecycles. Familiarity with DevOps practices and automation using Ansible, Azure DevOps or equivalent tooling is desirable.
• Integration of cloud services with on-premises infrastructure
• Proven experience of developing technical strategies and policies in line with business requirements
• Previous experience within a Higher Education Institution
• Experience of managing support contracts, ensuring vendors are compliant with their SLAs.
• Experience supporting core infrastructure platforms such as Hyper-V or Azure Stack HCI.

Skills, knowledge, and abilities

• Understanding of information security best practice as it applies to identity, authentication, privileged access, audit, logging and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Understanding of configuration management tools and techniques as part of application and infrastructure
• Knowledge of container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes or OpenShift and their identity and access integration requirements.
• Strong orchestration, scripting and automation experience using technologies such as PowerShell, Microsoft Graph, APIs, Azure DevOps, Ansible or Terraform.
• Knowledge of Windows Server and Red Hat Operating Systems.
• Understanding of procurement regulations, guidelines, and procedures such as tender processes and IT public sector frameworks
• Generous annual leave entitlement of 38 days inclusive of bank holidays and concessionary days (pro rata)
• Suite of holistic wellbeing benefits and support including family-friendly policies, generous sick pay provision and comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme
• Access to a variety of staff discounts at high street retailers
• Discounted onsite gym
• Holiday purchase
• Cycle to Work scheme
• A flexible working environment
• A commitment to personal and professional development

For further information and informal enquiries regarding the role, please contact Steve Smith, Cloud Infrastructure and Identity Manager via [e-mail]

The University is unable to sponsor the employment of international workers under the Skilled Worker route for this role; however, applications are welcome from candidates who are able to demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.

Equity, diversity and inclusion

The University of Derby is committed to fostering an open, inclusive and diverse community where everyone is treated with dignity, fairness and respect. We are committed to advancing equity, diversity and inclusion regardless of age, disability, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief (or none), sex or sexual orientation.

As a Disability Confident employer, we are committed to inclusive recruitment and welcome requests for adjustments throughout the recruitment process. Applicants may choose their preferred title, including 'Mx', and may share preferred pronouns if they wish. We also use anonymised shortlisting to help reduce the potential impact of unconscious bias. For more information on equity,diversityand inclusion at the University of Derby, pleasevisitour website .

We are also committed to promoting academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression within the law, in line with our Code of Practice , and value diversity of thought alongside diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

However you identify, we welcome applications from people whose experiences, perspectives and talents will contribute to our inclusive, supportive and intellectually vibrant community.

Environmental Sustainability

At the University of Derby, we are passionate about embedding sustainability into everything that we do. We aim to bring environmental sustainability into all aspects of the University, including teaching, research and operational activities. In line with the University's strategic framework, we expect all our staff to embed sustainability into their working practices and support the University's objective to reach net zero carbon by 2050.

The University of Derby is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all our staff, students and children. At the University of Derby, safeguarding is everybody's concern.