Who are we?
Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.
People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.
IT Infrastructure Core Service Manager
This role forms part of a distributed, global infrastructure team responsible for the availability, security, resilience and support of hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, with proactive monitoring, automation and lifecycle management.
Manage the outsourced managed service provider (MSP) delivering core infrastructure and cloud services, including cloud platforms, data centre hosting, compute, storage, virtualisation, identity, networking, monitoring, backup and recovery. Retain internal ownership of service outcomes, priorities, risks and escalations; use technical expertise to challenge proposals and assure delivery rather than routinely perform the provider’s operational tasks. Coordinate dependencies with workplace, application and security teams.
Reporting Line: Head of Infrastructure & Operations
Travel Requirements: Occasional travel to UK office locations as required.
Work Pattern: Full Time, Permanent
Job Specific Skills Profile
Service management and technical assurance skills required for the role:
Demonstrable experience managing outsourced infrastructure services or an MSP relationship, supported by a strong cloud/infrastructure engineering background and the ability to assess technical designs, operational evidence and remediation plans.
Strong understanding of Microsoft Azure and hybrid infrastructure services, including compute, storage, networking, role-based access control and Azure Policy; ability to assess provider designs, operational controls, availability, capacity and consumption costs.
Ability to govern core hosting, compute, storage and virtualisation services, assessing service dependencies, capacity forecasts, technology lifecycle risks and provider-led upgrade or migration plans.
Strong understanding of Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Group Policy and Microsoft Entra ID, including hybrid identity, Conditional Access and privileged access; ability to assure provider controls and agree ownership with internal identity and security teams.
Experience assuring provider delivery of monitoring, patching, vulnerability remediation, configuration management and technology lifecycle plans, using evidence from tools such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Tanium.
Experience governing backup, restore and disaster recovery services, including immutable or isolated backups, recovery testing and evidence of achievement against agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).
Extensive experience governing infrastructure and cloud service providers through service level agreements (SLAs), key performance indicators (KPIs), service reviews, contractual obligations and escalation processes, with clear responsibilities across suppliers and internal teams.
Desirable Experiece
Good knowledge of Windows Server 2025 and 2022, including secure configuration, lifecycle management and migration from legacy server versions.
Good knowledge of Active Directory, DHCP, DNS & Group Policy
Experience with supported server virtualisation platforms such as Nutanix & Microsoft Hyper-V, including availability, capacity and lifecycle management.
Experience automating administration with PowerShell and Microsoft Graph, including version control, testing, secure credential handling and documented…