As the operational custodian of the AIR6500 Software Integration Lab, you will establish and maintain the frameworks, processes and technical practices required to keep the environment healthy, available and ready for engineering activity.
You will:
- Own lab governance and scheduling — manage environment bookings, code drops, release gates and competing engineering priorities.
- Maintain lab operations — manage system accounts, software, storage, documentation, performance, backup/recovery and computing resources.
- Drive reliability — monitor uptime and lab health, understand recurring failures and move from reactive support to proactive sustainment.
- Automate recovery — maintain Ansible playbooks that enable developers to self-service VM resets and recovery.
- Control configuration — audit the environment against approved Mission System baselines and ensure infrastructure and facilities changes are authorised and traceable.
- Lead Tier 3 support — resolve complex issues beyond the Systems Administration Team and drive root-cause and problem management.
- Plan capacity — analyse utilisation and upcoming engineering demand to forecast infrastructure requirements and support hardware provisioning.
- Coordinate technical teams — work across Engineering, Systems Administration, Cyber, Network and Engineering Tools to manage changes and maintain a stable environment.
You’re the person engineers call when the lab is down and the answer isn't obvious.
You’re comfortable troubleshooting Linux, Kubernetes, automation and CI/CD, but you also think beyond the immediate fix. You want to understand why something failed, how to prevent it happening again and how to make the environment more reliable.
You’re calm under pressure, technically credible and comfortable working across multiple teams and competing priorities.
Most importantly, you understand that in Defence, configuration discipline, availability and operational resilience directly support the delivery of capability.
Why This Role Matters
The AIR6500 Software Integration Lab is a critical engineering environment.
Your role is to make sure it's there when engineers need it.
If you’re a Defence or Defence Industry systems professional who enjoys solving complex operational problems and taking ownership of the environment behind the engineering, we’d like to hear from you.
If you're a Defence systems professional who enjoys solving the problems behind the problems, this is your opportunity to take ownership of an environment that matters.
