About the Role

Key Responsibilities

OAT Strategy & Planning

• Define and own the Operational Acceptance Test strategy for the infrastructure refresh programme

• Develop OAT plans aligned to phased migrations, cutovers, and rollout waves

• Ensure OAT activities cover both new infrastructure and impacts to existing live services

• Establish clear OAT entry and exit criteria appropriate to infrastructure change

Infrastructure Service Readiness

• Coordinate and manage OAT activities across compute, storage, network, and end-user computing platforms

• Validate monitoring, alerting, capacity management, and operational tooling

• Ensure backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and resilience controls are tested and evidenced

• Validate security controls, access management, patching, and vulnerability management

Transition, Migration & Cutover Support

• Support infrastructure migration and cutover activities by ensuring operational controls are in place

• Validate rollback, recovery, and coexistence procedures

• Ensure operational teams are prepared to support both legacy and refreshed infrastructure during transition

• Provide OAT assurance to support go-live, migration, and decommissioning decisions

Stakeholder & Operational Engagement

• Act as the primary OAT interface between infrastructure delivery teams, IT operations, and service management

• Engage third-party suppliers and managed service providers as required

• Facilitate service readiness workshops and operational walkthroughs

• Ensure runbooks, support models, and escalation paths are complete and approved

Governance, Risk & Reporting

• Identify, manage, and report operational risks related to infrastructure change

• Ensure OAT outcomes are clearly evidenced and traceable

• Provide regular status reporting on operational readiness to programme and senior stakeholders

• Support formal OAT sign-off or readiness recommendations

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Strong experience managing Operational Acceptance Testing or Service Readiness for infrastructure programmes

• Proven experience with on-prem, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure platforms

• Solid understanding of IT service management (ITIL) and live service operations

• Experience supporting migrations, cutovers, and large-scale technology refreshes

• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills

Desirable

• Experience in data centre exit, cloud migration, or infrastructure modernisation programmes

• Knowledge of resilience, disaster recovery, and high-availability design

• Experience working with third-party infrastructure providers or MSPs

• Familiarity with SmartIT/Remedy, monitoring platforms, or CMDB tools

Qualifications

• ITIL Foundation or higher (preferred)

• Infrastructure or service management certifications (desirable)