IT Technical Lead / SME

We are seeking an experienced IT Technical Lead / SME with deep, broad expertise across modern IT infrastructure technologies. This is a hands-off leadership role, providing architectural guidance, technical oversight, and strategic direction to on-site technical teams. The ideal candidate will bring enterprise-scale experience from the oil & gas or energy sector, ideally having worked with major global organisations such as Saudi Aramco or other industry giants., * Serve as the senior technical authority across infrastructure domains, guiding engineering teams and ensuring alignment to best practices, architecture principles, and enterprise standards.

• Provide high-level architectural insight and act as a trusted SME on infrastructure strategy, technology choices, and solution design.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams (Operations, Security, Cloud, Networking, Applications) to ensure coordinated delivery of infrastructure initiatives.
• Conduct technical reviews of proposed solutions and designs, identifying risks, gaps, and improvements.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear guidance for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Support strategic planning, roadmap development, and continuous optimisation of infrastructure capabilities.
• Ensure infrastructure solutions meet organisational standards for resilience, scalability, compliance, and security.
• Act as a mentor and escalation point for technical teams, helping drive capability uplift and consistency across the organisation.

Technical Expertise

• Strong, broad knowledge across IT infrastructure architecture, including:

• Windows Server environments (AD, Group Policy, clustering, enterprise services)

• Linux-based systems (RHEL, Ubuntu, hardening, patching, enterprise deployment)

• On-premise infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, data centres)

• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or hybrid cloud models; governance, cost management, landing zones)

• Virtualisation & containerisation (VMware, Hyper-V, Kubernetes - desirable)

• Excellent understanding of IT operations, monitoring, tooling, service management and automation.

Industry Experience

• Experience working within the oil & gas, energy, petrochemical, or large industrial sectors is highly desirable.
• Prior roles supporting complex, global enterprise environments, ideally for major organisations

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication, capable of engaging confidently with senior leadership, engineers, and external partners.
• Strong stakeholder-management and influencing skills, with the ability to drive consensus in technically diverse teams.
• Proven experience operating in hands-off, advisory leadership roles with the ability to guide without direct control.
• Ability to manage competing priorities, provide clear direction, and ensure delivery of complex technical initiatives.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).

• Relevant certifications beneficial:

• Cloud (Azure/AWS Architect level certifications)

• ITIL, TOGAF, or other architecture frameworks

• Linux/Windows infrastructure certifications