Head of Hosting and Data Centres

19812

1
Digital, Data & Technology
Bow, Other
BOW CENTRAL COMMS
Band S
Full Time
36 hours per week
Permanent

Job Title: Head of Hosting and Data Centres

Salary: The starting salary is £90,336, which includes allowances totalling £2,928.

The salary is broken down as £87,408 basic salary, which will increase annually until you reach the top of the scale £96,341 Plus, a location allowance of £1,928 and a non-pensionable allowance of £1,000.

Location: The primary Met Location for this role is Bow. Travel across the Met Estate, to attend meetings as required by the business, is expected

 

“Keep checking Met Careers on a daily basis for new and exciting opportunities being released to join DDaT!”

Policing London is a hugely complex challenge that evolves every day. To make sure the Met is up to the task, we need the right IT and systems across our organisation. As a Head of Hosting and Data Centres, you will help to enable us to do our best for the London area. Join us and play your part in making London the safest capital in the world and delivering ‘More Trust, Less Crime and High Standards’.

As a member of the Met, you will also enjoy great benefits including annual leave, civil service pension arrangements, maternity/paternity support, as well as being part of a continuous learning culture.

Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT)

The mission of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) is to provide the Met with information (and specifically data), communications and technology to help frontline officers and Met staff do their jobs more efficiently, in order to deliver the New Met for London plan. In other words, DDaT is about “passionately delivering trusted technology for precise data driven policing”.

As well as keeping up to speed with developments in technology and making recommendations for new equipment and systems that will help modernise policing, DDaT also comprises the Data Office which:

  • Owns and drives the data compliance and analytics agenda.
  • Brings together the accountabilities that are currently dispersed across the Met business areas.
  • Consolidates and further develops existing Met data and insight services.
  • Enables data sharing and collaboration to serve the public and external partners.

DDaT is committed to creating an inclusive working environment. We support hybrid working, and the hiring manager will be happy to discuss arrangements for this role.

Job Purpose

  • Has responsibility for the strategic vision, leadership, and operational management of the Authority’s Hosting infrastructure. This includes overseeing the design, implementation, and maintenance of private and public cloud-based solutions, ensuring security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, while also managing a small team of Hosting and Datacentre professionals. The role requires a deep understanding of cloud technologies (especially in Microsoft Azure), strong leadership skills, and the ability to align Hosting strategy with business objectives. 
  • Has the overall accountability for the Hosting infrastructure and the associated services delivered by the infrastructure (Hosting) supplier and other 3rd party suppliers.
  • Ensures the best balance of quality, risk and value for money for the MPS, by providing oversight, challenge, guidance and decision authority to the suppliers, as well as providing service-focused input into the change projects.
  • This role is part of the Core Infrastructure Platforms Management Team and contributes to the overall development of the Services vision, strategy and planning.

Key Role Responsibilities

  • Ownership and accountability for the live infrastructure and related services, including technology and service design, performance, risk and cost. Manages the Infrastructure (Hosting) supplier and other 3rd party suppliers contracted directly to the MPS.
  • Owns the definition of the services to be delivered by the infrastructure (Hosting) supplier, including the technology, processes, deliverables, KPIs and performance criteria, aligned to the overall MPS Service Delivery and Performance Framework.
  • Collaborates with application owners, Security teams, Architects, and business stakeholders to align hosting solutions to business requirements.
  • Maintains awareness of applicable strategies, architectures, policies and standards (whether MPS or external) and ensures that the suppliers are aware of them and implement them appropriately. Works with the Infrastructure (Hosting) and other suppliers to agree non-functional requirements and acceptance criteria to be applied to future changes.
  • Agrees technical processes and tools, e.g. monitoring, ensuring they are aligned with the MPS Technology standards, or diverge for acceptable reasons. Works with Security and Business Continuity Management specialists to ensure suppliers are fully cognizant of these requirements.  Agrees with the supplier a roadmap for the relevant products including upgrades and refreshes.
  • Manages hosting operations, including backup, disaster recovery, patching, etc, Provides guidance and support to the supplier on exceptions in the course of day-to-day operational delivery, for example overseeing handling of Major Incidents, signing off post incident reviews, resolving issues between the Infrastructure (Hosting) supplier and other 3rd Party suppliers. Provides decisions and approvals, for example approving emergency changes or acceptance of known errors.
  • Agrees regular supplier reviews, covering (but not limited to) demand, capacity, risk, service levels, cost, quality, compliance, etc. Commissions ad-hoc reports and proposals. Provides inputs into these reviews, e.g. business plans, volumes, assumptions. Reviews supplier reports, recommendations and proposals (e.g. increase in capacity) challenging designs and costs, to ensure sound value for money solutions for the MPS.
  • Acts as a sponsor for any agreed changes, taking them through MPS governance as appropriate. This includes developing business cases, with input from the suppliers and MPS stakeholders, e.g. Architecture, Finance and Commercial. Works with Programme Management to agree an overall Service Maintenance Programme of "BAU" projects, and to commission own projects. Oversees these projects in terms of technical and financial solutions.
  • Represents Core Infrastructure (Hosting) in the DDaT Technical and Service Design Authorities (or equivalent), providing input to Strategies and Business-led (i.e. not "BAU") projects and programmes, in terms of practical infrastructure impact assessments and
  • solution designs. Provides design gate signoff on behalf of the MPS. Supports onboarding of new suppliers.
  • Provides scrutiny and signoff of significant (related) changes prior to implementation into production.
  • Owns and manages the Hosting infrastructure budget, ensuring resources are allocated effectively and efficiently. Identifying cost optimization strategies for cloud resources, ensuring efficient utilization and minimizing expenses. 
  • Owns the Infrastructure (Hosting) Risk Register and ensures risks are managed and escalated when appropriate. Ensures hosting environments comply with regulatory requirements and internal security standards.
  • Owns the financial forecasts. Signs off Purchase Orders and Invoices.
  • Reviews performance, covering delivery, issues, risks and improvements, challenging the suppliers to continually increase quality, drive out risk and reduce cost. Signs off performance reports and participates in Operational Supplier Governance Reviews as appropriate.
  • Partners with Commercial / Procurement to manage supplier performance against the contract, resolve contractual disputes, implement contract changes (e.g. due to agreed changes in service), support routine contract extensions and renewals and support benchmarking exercises. Takes a leading role in periodic re-tendering of the main Tower Contract.
  • As a senior member of the MPS Platforms Management Team, works with Core Infrastructure Director on service strategy and vision and represents on project and programme Boards and Governance bodies.

Vetting Clearance

This post requires access to the most sensitive intelligence material on a daily basis. Applicants must hold or be prepared to undergo National Security Vetting (NSV) Security Check (enhanced) (SC(e)) level before taking up the post

Hybrid Working

Hybrid Working available in line with the Metropolitan Police Service hybrid working policy.

How to apply

To begin your career at the Met, please click the "apply now" button below. The application process requires a comprehensive CV, a Personal Statement (Max 1000 words), and an online application form. In your Personal Statement, you should explain your interest in the position and illustrate how your skills and experiences make you a suitable candidate. Please note that you should not submit two copies of your CV, and ensure that your documents are saved in either PDF or Word format, clearly labelled as CV and/or Personal Statement.

Completed applications must be submitted by 23:55 on 13th October 2025.

Once received, your application will be reviewed against eligibility criteria, following this, your application will be reviewed by the hiring manager. The application review for this vacancy will commence w/c 20th October.

Following application review, successful candidates will be invited to interview. Interview dates will commence w/c 3rd November.

www.metpolicecareers.co.uk

Essential Criteria:

Knowledge

  • Previous experience in managing large-scale Hosting (on prem and cloud) environments and Data Centre Services, leveraging industry trends and current thinking.
  • Detailed understanding of specific Hosting related technology (especially Microsoft’s Azure platform), PaaS, IaaS, Virtual environments, Infrastructure as Code as well as associated licensing models (VMWare, SQL etc.) and able to use knowledge to challenge and support suppliers.
  • Commercial understanding of specific Hosting related technologies, industry trends and best practice in order to be able to challenge and support suppliers in their delivery to MPS.
  • Strong understanding of Financial and Commercial models to understand the options available to MPS in delivering best value through existing and revised commercial models where required.
  • Good understanding of Hosting Security implications, as well as wider technology touchpoints.

Skills

  • Excellent stakeholder and supplier management.
  • Strong leadership and people management skills. Excellent interpersonal skills, including teamwork, collaboration, facilitation, negotiation, and achieving results by influencing others.
  • Ability to use specialist knowledge of cloud architecture principles including security, scalability, high availability, automation and DevOps to provide support to, but also to challenge, suppliers and colleagues.
  • Commercially and technically astute problem solver, with the ability to quickly get to the heart of a problem and propose effective solutions, including the deep understanding of associated Financial Models

Experience

  • Supplier management
  • Board level influencing.
  • Extensive technology strategy and delivery management (specifically in Hosting and Data Centres).
  • Management of a multi-supplier outsourced environments, ideally based on a Towers model or similar.

Qualifications

  • Minimum 10-years’ experience managing complex Hosting Environments.
  • Proven track record in managing Cloud Infrastructure

Desirable Criteria

  • Knowledge of alternative (to VMWare) Virtual Hosting Operating systems (e.g. Nutanix, Hyper-V).
  • Knowledge of Automation technologies (e.g.GitHub, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible).
English
BB3 - Director of Core Infrastructure
Disability Confident Statement 

The Met is committed to being an equitable (fair and impartial) and inclusive employer for disabled people, striving to have a diverse and representative workforce at all levels. We encourage applications from people from the widest possible range of backgrounds, cultures and experiences. We particularly welcome applications from people with disabilities and long-term conditions, ethnic minority groups and women.

As a Disability Confident Leader, the Met has committed to making disability equality part of our everyday practice. We ensure that people with disabilities and those with long term conditions have the opportunities to fulfil their potential and realise their aspirations.

The Met is committed to making reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process to ensure disabled applicants can perform at their best. If you need any reasonable adjustments or changes to the application and recruitment process, we ask that you include this information within your application form. All matters will be treated in strict confidence.

Please note, if you are applying for a police officer role or to become a police community support officer (PCSO) or designated detention officer (DDO), there is a minimum requirement that you must pass a job-related fitness test (JRFT) at point of entry. This does not apply to police staff roles. Find out more about police fitness standards.

Read our full disability confidence statement.


This opportunity is closed to applications.