Overview of the role

Here at the John Lewis Partnership we have a bold and ambitious IT team. We support our business by providing industry-leading technology solutions that cater for our customer needs whenever and wherever they are, continually driving innovation, transforming our infrastructure and delivering new and unique ways of shopping. Our mission is to delight customers at every opportunity and to maintain our reputation as the best retailer in the country.

We now have a fantastic and exciting opportunity within our IT team - a rare opportunity to join us as an Infrastructure Lead Partner in a Cloud Product Owner role to advance several key Platform towers including private and public cloud, hosting, and automation solutions. We are seeking an experienced individual to lead these technology towers and to deliver secure, robust, stable and performant solutions.

If you’re passionate about DevOps and cloud transformation, if you thrive and perform in a fast-paced, high-demand environment, and if you take satisfaction in driving results through others, then we want to hear from you!

What you’ll be doing

You will be working as part of a larger team covering a spectrum of technologies in a modern hybrid enterprise environment where large inter-dependencies make up a successful infrastructure capability.

You will drive and be accountable for the outcomes the business requires in relation to your services. This means that you will be working effectively with Partners and our strategic third party service providers to ensure successful delivery of the service, and strategy, whilst managing operational risks throughout.

Key Responsibilities include:

• Develop working relationships with key business stakeholders and build understanding of the commercial, technical, and operational landscape and business strategy

• Be the product owner for key technology towers, in particular Cloud Platforms, and Automation

• Experienced in stakeholder engagement by leading Cloud Center of Excellence to drive Product deliveries and value

• As Product Owner, define the vision for the product backlog and prioritise product group workloads to deliver business and technical requirements

• Work collaboratively with with internal agile engineering teams

• Develop the product groups into high performing agile engineering teams

• Deliver value for John Lewis Partnership by driving quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness from all infrastructure management contracts

• Manage suppliers and vendors to ensure Infrastructure remains secure, stable, robust and performant

• Ensure that the services provided by vendors and managed service suppliers deliver against agreed SLAs, key metrics, and statements of work

• Use your knowledge of the end to end hosting services and an understanding of its consumption by the business to develop a forecast of demand for the service and (by extension) the vendor’s services

• Influence decisions in relation to the vendor and provisioning of service for your towers

• Work with Architecture to ensure deliverables are aligned with the business and technical strategy, producing business cases to deliver change and innovation

• Ensure full life cycle management is planned, managed and delivered across the infrastructure estate; with published and managed roadmaps

• Be the authoritative point of escalation for your technology towers.

Essential Skills

• A comprehensive knowledge of modern Hosted Service principles, along with proven experience of how these technologies support an enterprise business

• Demonstrable experience of leading managed service providers in a complex enterprise IT environment in addition to definition of SLAs, KPI, and innovation targets

• Proven experience of managing high value third party contracts and having budgetary management skills, understanding of contract penalties and experience with service renewals and supporting processes

• Technical experience and skills in some or all of the following areas:

  • Understands the landscape & comprehends the challenges of Google Cloud Platform

  • Infrastructure Automation - VMware Automation, Ansible, Terraform

  • DevOps tools - e.g CI/CD (Jenkins, Gitlab), Docker, Nexus, Bitbucket Chocolatey

  • Cloud infrastructures and the concept of Software Defined Data Centres

  • Google Cloud / AWS - GCE/EC2/K8S/GKE/EKS

  • A good understanding of Agile and DevOps practices and methodologies. (Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban, CI/CD).

• The ability to work under pressure in a fast paced environment, with outstanding problem-solving skills, an analytical mind and demonstrate a strong attention to detail.

Desirable Skills

• A degree in Computer Science, IT, Systems Engineering or a related qualification

• Experience working with a hybrid cloud presentation comprising large elements of on-premise and public cloud workloads

• FinOps experience: Budgeting/Forecasting/Cost Optimisation

• Management of Cloud CoE

• ITIL V3 & Prince2

• Experience in the retail sector, both physical and online.

Flexible Working

The Partnership has adopted a blended working approach meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the office (Bracknell) and home, based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business. Our technology teams aim for around 1 - 2 days a week in the office to connect and on a more ad-hoc basis to attend key meetings.

Benefits:

- Hybrid Working.

️ - Full - time working holiday entitlement 25 days holiday, plus public and bank holidays

• Defined Contribution pension scheme where your contributions will be matched by the Partnership (up to 8% of pay) and, after three years’ service, you’ll receive an additional Partnership contribution of 4% of pay, regardless of whether you pay in or not
• You’ll get Partnership discount in store and online once you complete Probation. That’s 25% off in John Lewis & Partners (12% off electrical products) and 20% in Waitrose & Partners. You’ll also be able to nominate someone you live with to share your discount
• Simple cycle to work support scheme
• We’re really proud of our exclusive hotels based in some of Britain’s most beautiful areas and once you’ve been with us for three months, you’re welcome to explore them. Find out more about our hotels here
• Learn more about our Benefits structure.

Next Steps

• The application form consists of a CV upload, followed by application questions. Please visit - https://www.jlpjobs.com/how-to-apply/journey/ to understand more about application and hiring process

• Internal applicants please copy paste this link on to the browser for job outline - https://bit.ly/InfraLead

• We occasionally close vacancies early in the event that we receive a high volume of applications. Therefore we recommend you apply as soon as possible.

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