Job of the Week: Head of Core Infrastructure, Lloyds Group
Lloyds Banking Group is seeking a Head of Core Infrastructure to "own all facets of designing, building, migrating, running and evolving the distributed estate" -- we're making it The Stack's latest Job of the Week.
"Our technology, our culture, and our mind-set is changing to craft a true technology led organisation. You'll role model our values and behaviours and shape, coach and lead a team, aligning our Platform agenda with the Group's Strategy" the bank said on July 18, adding it was "looking for a good balance between leader and inspiring the team with the ability to get 'hands on' when needed, in effect a Leader Practitioner".
Lloyds Banking Group is the UK's largest retail and commercial banking group, and includes brands like Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Schroders Personal Wealth, Scottish Widows and Black Horse.
Lloyds Banking Group Infrastructure role
The bank is seeking a candidate with:
- "A strong technical appreciation of Core Infrastructure as a discipline and Cloud Technology.
- A broad understanding of Cloud Platforms.
- Good knowledge of distributed systems and architectures.
- Ability to define and review technical architectures.
- Good knowledge of security principles and access management.
- Experience in building platforms and services."
The role comes as the Bank of England gave the UK’s banks three years to improve their IT and operational resilience.“It is likely that they [banks] will need to invest” the Bank of England (BoE) said.
“We expect [operational resilience] to become a major consideration in their investment programmes. Designing services to be resilient is often easier than reverse engineering resilience into fragile services.”
It is offering 30 days of holiday, up to £135k and a flexible and inclusive working environment. You can see more here. Whilst technology firms out there may be paying more, for those who like a substantial challenge and joining an organisation comparatively early in a major digital transformation effort, the role looks like a compelling one with a good and rapidly growing team.
See also: Job of the Week: Head, Innovation Unit, NATO
The hire comes as the group has vowed to transform its heterogeneous collection of technologies with the aim of boosting innovation and reducing the cost to run its sprawling IT estate. The cloud (public and private) is a significant part of that journey. The bank is early on it, noting in its most recent annual report that this "investment in new technologies that have the potential to transform customer offerings and deliver a step-change in efficiency, from the migration and simplification of legacy systems to the creation of new cloud-based architecture. While many of these initiatives are in their infancy and pose significant challenges in execution, successful adoption has the potential to deliver highly innovative customer propositions with a significantly reduced time to market, as well as a highly scalable, resilient and agile technology architecture at a significantly lower cost..."
The group added in that report, published March 24, that "we continue to explore the potential of new technology architecture, supported by strategic partnerships, and in 2021 we increased investment in this area to assess these capabilities and opportunities. This included the safe migration of around 120,000 back book customer accounts in a pilot of new bank architecture, providing a proof-point for our investment and to build confidence in our ability to utilise new cloud-based architecture" -- it is, in short, still a very open process and the role will be an influential one in helping shape the right direction of its core infrastructure.
