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For more information, visit WPP.com.
Why we're hiring:
The Head of Infrastructure, Data & Technology Solutions is responsible for establishing and coordinating the infrastructure standards, operating model, governance, and cross-cutting platform capabilities required to run DTS products securely, reliably and consistently.
DTS operates a federated model, where specialist product and platform teams retain autonomy for how they build, deploy and operate their own environments. The Head of Infrastructure ensures those teams operate within a common set of DTS standards for reliability, observability, security, deployment control, cost visibility, operational readiness and resilience.
The role will work closely with the CTO, Chief Architect, SVP Data Collaboration Infrastructure, SVP Security and Compliance, TechOps, Engineering, Product, Enterprise Technology and platform leads across InfoSum, Open Intelligence, Resolve and other DTS capabilities.
The purpose of the role is to create alignment and visibility across infrastructure and providing the autonomy needed by specialist teams to operate according to agreed standards and principles.
What you'll be doing:
- Infrastructure standards and operating model
Define and maintain the common infrastructure standards that DTS platforms must meet.
This includes:
- Working with DTS leadership to define infrastructure principles, minimum standards and operating expectations.
- Establishing standards for reliability, observability, deployment governance, security, resilience, cost visibility and operational readiness.
- Ensuring standards are practical and can be adopted by different DTS platform teams.
- Creating a clear infrastructure operating model that distinguishes between central standards and product-team autonomy.
- Ensuring infrastructure standards are aligned with DTS architecture, security, product and commercial priorities.
- Federated infrastructure governance
Coordinate a federated infrastructure model across DTS.
This includes:
- Ensuring InfoSum, Open Intelligence, Resolve and other platform teams can operate their own infrastructure while meeting common DTS requirements.
- Avoiding unnecessary centralisation that would slow down specialist teams or remove useful autonomy.
- Defining where common tooling or central coordination is required.
- Ensuring each product/platform team has clear infrastructure ownership and accountability.
- Creating mechanisms to monitor whether teams are operating within agreed standards.
- Alignment with DTS leadership
Ensure infrastructure decisions are aligned with senior DTS leadership and broader platform strategy.
This includes:
- Taking direction from the CTO, Chief Architect, SVP Data Collaboration Infrastructure and SVP Security and Compliance on infrastructure priorities.
- Translating DTS architecture and security principles into practical infrastructure standards.
- Working with DTS leaders to resolve trade-offs between autonomy, standardisation, cost, security and reliability.
- Ensuring infrastructure decisions support the wider DTS platform direction.
- Providing leadership with visibility of infrastructure risks, gaps, dependencies and progress.
- Deployment governance and change visibility
Create common deployment governance and production change visibility across DTS.
This includes:
- Defining minimum standards for production deployment processes.
- Establishing central visibility of who deployed what, when and where.
- Supporting release gates, change records and deployment auditability.
- Enabling teams to use their own deployment tooling while reporting into a common deployment record.
- Supporting mechanisms to pause or control deployments during high-risk or sensitive periods.
- Ensuring deployment activity can be correlated with incidents, outages and platform instability.
- Observability,monitoringand operational visibility
Define common observability and monitoring expectations across DTS platforms.
This includes:
- Establishing standards for logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and dashboards.
- Ensuring product teams provide the right operational and security telemetry.
- Supporting cross-platform visibility for incidents, chained attacks, service degradation and performance issues.
- Working with Security Operations on SIEM, SOC and threat detection requirements.
- Ensuring infrastructure and application events are visible to the right operational teams.
- Reliability,resilienceand operational readiness
Ensure DTS platforms meet agreed reliability and resilience expectations.
This includes:
- Defining standards for service-level objectives, availability, recovery, incident readiness and operational maturity.
- Working with platform teams to ensure services are designed and operated to appropriate reliability levels.
- Supporting disaster recovery, business continuity and operational readiness requirements.
- Ensuring teams have appropriate runbooks, escalation paths and incident response processes.
- Tracking recurring operational issues and ensuring they are addressed through the appropriate teams.
- Infrastructure security alignment
Work with Security and Compliance to ensure infrastructure standards support DTS security requirements.
This includes:
- Ensuring infrastructure standards reflect security requirements around access control, network exposure, ingress/egress, secrets, logging and hardening.
- Working with the Cloud and Platform Security Lead where applicable.
- Ensuring teams provide evidence that required infrastructure security controls are in place.
- Supporting the reduction of unnecessary public exposure across DTS services.
- Ensuring infrastructure governance supports audit, compliance and client assurance requirements.
- Cost visibility and capacity oversight
Establish infrastructure cost transparency and capacity visibility across DTS.
This includes:
- Defining standards for cloud cost reporting and allocation.
- Ensuring teams can report infrastructure cost by product, platform, client or workload where appropriate.
- Identifying areas of duplication, waste or inefficient infrastructure use.
- Supporting capacity planning across growing DTS platforms and AI/data workloads.
- Providing leadership with clear visibility of infrastructure cost drivers and optimisation opportunities.
- Relationship with TechOps
Work closely with the TechOps function while maintaining clear ownership boundaries.
TechOps is responsible for day-to-day delivery operations, environment support, release coordination and operational support to engineering teams.
The Head of Infrastructure is responsible for defining infrastructure standards, governance, shared visibility, reliability expectations and cross-DTS platform coordination.
This includes:
- Partnering with TechOps to ensure infrastructure standards are practical in delivery workflows.
- Using TechOps feedback to identify recurring operational issues and improvement opportunities.
- Avoiding duplication of TechOps responsibilities.
- Ensuring delivery operations and infrastructure governance operate as a joined-up capability.
- Clarifying when issues should be handled by TechOps, product engineering, infrastructure teams, security or DTS leadership.
- Common tooling and shared platform capabilities
Identify and coordinate shared tooling where it benefits DTS.
This includes:
- Assessing where common tooling should be used for deployment governance, observability, incident management, cost reporting, infrastructure inventory and operational reporting.
- Avoiding unnecessary standardisation where teams need specialist tooling.
- Supporting common integration points rather than forcing all teams onto identical infrastructure stacks.
- Defining central capabilities that allow teams to remain autonomous while providing DTS-wide visibility.
- Working with Architecture and Infrastructure teams to introduce shared services where there is clear value.
Who you'll be working with:
The Head of Infrastructure will be accountable for:
- Common DTS infrastructure standards and operating model.
- Federated infrastructure governance across DTS platforms.
- Alignment of infrastructure activity with DTS leadership direction.
- Deployment governance and production change visibility.
- Observability, monitoring and operational visibility standards.
- Reliability, resilience and operational readiness expectations.
- Infrastructure cost visibility and reporting.
- Clear distinction and partnership between Infrastructure and TechOps.
- Infrastructure alignment with DTS architecture, security and compliance requirements.
- Ensuring platform teams retain autonomy while meeting common DTS standards.
What you'll need:
The successful candidate will have:
- Multiple years of experience overseeing infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, cloud operations or technology operations leadership.
- Strong understanding of cloud platforms, deployment models, observability, reliability, infrastructure governance and operational resilience.
- Experience working in federated or matrixed technology organisations.
- Ability to define standards and operating models without over-centralising delivery.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, deployment governance, incident management, monitoring, logging and production operations.
- Good knowledge of infrastructure security, access control, network exposure, cloud posture and operational risk.
- Ability to influence senior technical leaders and product/platform teams without relying solely on line authority.
- Strong stakeholder management skills across Engineering, Architecture, Security, Product, TechOps and Enterprise Technology.
- Ability to balance autonomy, consistency, security, reliability and delivery speed.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to create practical standards that teams can adopt.
Leadership expectations
The Head of Infrastructure is expected to:
- Act as a coordinator and enabler, not a central blocker.
- Respect the autonomy of specialist product and platform teams.
- Create clarity around infrastructure standards and expectations.
- Work closely with DTS senior leadership and take direction from agreed architecture and security strategy.
- Build trust with TechOps, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security and Product teams.
- Challenge teams where infrastructure practices create risk, poor visibility or operational weakness.
- Avoid unnecessary centralisation while reducing fragmentation where it creates risk.
- Provide clear reporting on infrastructure health, cost, reliability and operational readiness.
Success measures
Success in the role will be measured by:
- DTS having clear and adopted infrastructure standards.
- Product and platform teams operating autonomously while meeting common DTS expectations.
- Improved visibility of deployments and production changes across DTS.
- Better observability and monitoring across DTS platforms.
- Clearer understanding of infrastructure ownership and operational accountability.
- Improved ability to correlate incidents with deployments and infrastructure changes.
- Reduced infrastructure fragmentation where it creates operational, security or cost risk.
- Improved infrastructure cost transparency.
- Stronger alignment between Infrastructure, TechOps, Security, Architecture and Engineering.
- Leadership having confidence in the reliability, visibility and governability of DTS infrastructure.
Who you are:
You're open: We are inclusive and collaborative; we encourage the free exchange of ideas; we respect and celebrate diverse views. We are open-minded: to new ideas, new partnerships, new ways of working.
You're optimistic: We believe in the power of creativity, technology and talent to create brighter futures or our people, our clients and our communities. We approach all that we do with conviction: to try the new and to seek the unexpected.
You're extraordinary: we are stronger together: through collaboration we achieve the amazing. We are creative leaders and pioneers of our industry; we provide extraordinary every day.
What we'll give you:
Passionate, inspired people – We aim to create a culture in which people can do extraordinary work.
Scale and opportunity – We offer the opportunity to create, influence and complete projects at a scale that is unparalleled in the industry.
Challenging and stimulating work – Unique work and the opportunity to join a group of creative problem solvers. Are you up for the challenge?
#LI-Hybrid
We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.
WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.
