Infrastructure and Data Centre Senior Engineer

Company Overview:

1-grid is a fast-growing web hosting company in Cape Town with an established customer base, recently acquired by recognized leaders in the Internet services industry. We have the vision and resources to be the market leader in SA in the next 5 years; this vision is supported by an entrepreneurial culture that encourages innovation, collaboration, and top performance.

Role Purpose

The Infrastructure and Data Center Manager is responsible for the end-to-end management of 1-grid’s data center operations, ensuring high availability, security, efficiency, and scalability of hosting and colocation services. This role oversees physical infrastructure, people, vendors, and processes, including the procurement, lifecycle management, and optimisation of data center hardware and equipment.

Key Responsibilities:

Data Center Operations

• Manage daily operations of the data center to ensure 24/7/365 availability of hosting services.
• Oversee critical infrastructure including power, cooling, fire suppression, cabling, racks, and physical security systems.
• Ensure compliance with uptime targets, SLAs, and internal operational standards.
• Develop, maintain, and enforce standard operating procedures (SOPs), maintenance schedules, and emergency response plans.

Infrastructure, Capacity & Hardware Management

• Plan and manage space, power, cooling, and rack capacity to support current and future business needs.
• Coordinate installation, migration, and decommissioning of servers, networking equipment, storage, and customer hardware.
• Maintain accurate documentation of infrastructure layouts and dependencies.

Hardware Procurement & Asset Lifecycle Management

• Lead the procurement of data center hardware, including servers, storage, networking equipment, racks, PDUs, cabling, and spare parts.
• Work closely with finance, engineering, and vendors to ensure cost-effective, scalable, and standardised hardware solutions.
• Manage supplier selection, quotations, purchase orders, and delivery timelines.
• Ensure hardware purchases align with capacity planning, technical standards, and business growth forecasts.
• Maintain full asset lifecycle management, including inventory tracking, warranty management, refresh cycles, and secure disposal.
• Identify opportunities to optimise hardware spend, improve utilisation, and reduce total cost of ownership.

Security, Risk & Compliance

• Ensure physical and operational compliance with standards such as ISO 27001, SOC, PCI-DSS, and internal security policies.
• Manage physical access controls, monitoring systems, and visitor procedures.
• Conduct regular risk assessments and ensure mitigation plans are implemented and reviewed.

Incident, Change & Problem Management

• Act as the escalation point for critical incidents and outages, leading response and resolution activities.
• Coordinate root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews.
• Manage change control processes for data center and hardware-related changes to minimise risk and disruption.

Vendor & Stakeholder Management

• Manage relationships with hardware vendors, OEMs, distributors, maintenance providers, and facilities contractors.
• Monitor vendor performance against SLAs and contractual obligations.
• Collaborate with internal teams including network, systems, cloud, customer support, sales, and finance.

People Management

• Lead, coach, and develop data center technicians and facilities staff.
• Ensure adequate staffing, shift coverage, and on-call rotations.
• Promote a strong culture of safety, accountability, operational excellence, and customer focus.

Financial & Budget Management

• Own and manage the data center operational budget (OPEX) and contribute to capital expenditure (CAPEX) planning.
• Forecast hardware and infrastructure costs based on growth and refresh cycles.
• Track spend against budget and identify cost-saving initiatives without compromising service quality.

Minimum Requirements

Qualifications

• Diploma or Degree in IT, Engineering, Facilities Management, or a related discipline.
• Relevant certifications such as CDCP, CDCS, ITIL, ISO 27001, or similar (advantageous).

Experience

• 8-10 years’ experience in data center operations, and hosting environment.
• Proven experience managing hardware procurement and vendor relationships.
• Experience leading operational or technical teams in a mission-critical environment.

Technical & Professional Skills

• Strong understanding of data center infrastructure, power and cooling systems, and redundancy models (N+1, 2N).
• Solid knowledge of servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and hosting platforms.
• Experience with inventory, asset management, and procurement processes.
• Strong analytical, planning, and problem-solving skills.
• Advanced technical troubleshooting skills for network and server hardware.

Personal Attributes

• Calm, decisive, and resilient under pressure.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Highly organised with strong attention to detail.
• Commercially minded with a continuous improvement mindset.

Values Alignment:

The Infrastructure and Data Centre Manager is expected to live out and promote the values: Accountability, Customer Centric, Teamwork, Inclusivity, Respect, Transparency, Quality and Collaboration