​Manager: IT Infrastructure at National Health Laboratory Services

Key Job Responsibility 

• Infrastructure Architecture, Design & Technology Roadmap: Design and maintain NHLS compute and storage architecture, including on-premises and hosted/private cloud environments. Develop and execute an infrastructure roadmap aligned to NHLS IT strategy, operational requirements, and governance. Define infrastructure standards (build specifications, configuration baselines, hardening guidelines, naming conventions, and documentation standards). Evaluate new technologies and provide recommendations supported by business cases, risk assessments, and total cost of ownership (TCO) considerations.
• Compute Platform Management (Physical & Virtual): Manage enterprise compute platforms (e.g., virtualisation clusters, hypervisor environments, physical server estate). Ensure high availability, performance, and stability of production infrastructure through proactive monitoring and capacity management. Oversee build, patching, firmware management, and lifecycle replacement of compute components in line with security and vendor guidance. Ensure standardised provisioning processes for new workloads (including templates, automation, and change controls).
• Storage Platform Management: Manage enterprise storage platforms (SAN/NAS/object storage where applicable), ensuring performance, resilience, and data integrity. Implement storage tiering, capacity forecasting, and performance tuning to support critical workloads and laboratory systems. Maintain storage replication and resilience mechanisms and ensure alignment with recovery requirements for Tier 1 applications.
• Backup, Restore & Data Protection (Primary Accountability): Own NHLS backup strategy and operations to ensure reliable, verifiable backups of NHLS data and application systems. Ensure backup policies are defined, implemented, and enforced (retention, encryption, immutability where available, offsite copies, and access controls). Establish routine restore testing, including application-level recovery validation and periodic disaster recovery (DR) exercises.
• Maintain evidence for audits: backup success reports, restore test results, DR runbooks, and incident records.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Enablement: Implement and maintain DR capabilities for critical systems, aligned with business-defined RTO/RPO and NHLS tiering classifications. Maintain DR documentation and runbooks; coordinate and participate in DR simulations and post-exercise improvement plans. Support operational continuity plans related to infrastructure dependencies.
• Operational Support & Service Delivery: Lead the infrastructure support function to ensure timely resolution of incidents and service requests (aligned to agreed SLAs/OLAs). Provide escalation support for complex infrastructure issues and coordinate problem management to eliminate recurring incidents. Ensure monitoring, alerting, and operational dashboards are effective and continuously improved. Ensure accurate asset and configuration information is maintained (CMDB or equivalent).
• Security, Risk & Compliance: Implement infrastructure security controls: least privilege, secure configuration baselines, segmentation dependencies, vulnerability remediation, and audit logging. Participate in risk assessments and implement mitigation plans for infrastructure-related risks (e.g., ransomware resilience, backup security, privileged access). Ensure compliance with NHLS governance requirements and applicable regulatory obligations (e.g., POPIA principles as they relate to data protection).
• Vendor, Contract & Financial Management: Manage vendor relationships for compute, storage, backup and associated support contracts.
• Support procurement processes: specification drafting, technical evaluations, contract performance reviews, and renewal planning. Contribute to budgeting for infrastructure refresh, licensing, and support services, track expenditure against plan.
• People Leadership & Capability Development: Lead and mentor infrastructure support engineers; allocate work, set priorities, and conduct performance management. Identify skills gaps and implement training/certification plans, support succession planning and talent retention. Establish a culture of operational excellence: documentation discipline, proactive maintenance, and continuous improvement.
• Governance, Documentation & Reporting: Produce management reports (availability, capacity, backup compliance, DR readiness, incident trends, risks). Ensure change management compliance for infrastructure changes (CAB submissions, implementation plans, rollback procedures, PIRs). Maintain up-to-date documentation: architecture diagrams, standards, runbooks, build guides, and SOPs. 

Minimum requirements & key competency 

• Bachelor’s Degree / Advanced Diploma ((NQF 7) in Information Technology or Related Red Hat Certified Administrator (RHCA) or (RHCE) Storage Area Network Certification VMware Professional Certification
• Eight (8) years relevant experience with Five (5) years in a management / supervisory / project management or team lead capacity ITIL Certification (Desirable) Oracle Linux Certification (Desirable) Veeam Certified Engineer (Desirable) Valid Driver’s License