Virtualization Team Lead

We are seeking an experienced Virtualization Team Lead to lead the design, operation, and continuous improvement of enterprise virtualization platforms. The role combines hands-on platform ownership with technical leadership, service reliability, capacity planning, and coordination with infrastructure, storage, network, security, and application teams.
Key Responsibilities
Virtualization Platform Management
- Lead the administration and lifecycle management of VMware vSphere/ESXi or equivalent platforms.
- Manage hypervisors, clusters, virtual machines, templates, resource pools, and virtual networking.
- Design and maintain HA, live migration, fault-tolerance, and workload placement capabilities.
- Plan and execute upgrades, patching, configuration changes, and platform refresh activities.
- Monitor performance, capacity, availability, and platform health; resolve complex incidents.
- Maintain secure configurations, RBAC, privileged access, and platform hardening standards.
Technical Leadership and Operations
- Set technical standards, review designs and changes, and guide virtualization engineers.
- Coordinate operational workload, escalations, maintenance windows, and service restoration.
- Lead root cause analysis and corrective actions for recurring or high-impact incidents.
- Collaborate with storage and network teams on compute, storage, and virtual network dependencies.
- Coordinate with vendors and service providers; evaluate platform options and technical risks.
- Maintain architecture diagrams, operational procedures, recovery plans, and configuration records.
Resilience, Automation, and Improvement
- Ensure backup, replication, and disaster recovery integrations are operational and tested.
- Support capacity forecasting, licensing reviews, performance tuning, and resource optimization.
- Identify opportunities to automate provisioning, reporting, and routine administration.
- Use PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python, or Ansible to improve consistency and reduce manual work.
- Contribute to infrastructure projects, audits, and service continuity exercises.
Required Technical Skills
- Strong hands-on experience with VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, and enterprise clusters.
- Knowledge of virtual networking, distributed switches, VLANs, and NSX or equivalent is an advantage.
- Understanding of compute, SAN/NAS storage, backup, replication, and disaster recovery concepts.
- Experience with monitoring, capacity management, patching, and configuration lifecycle processes.
- Scripting or automation experience with PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python, or Ansible.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across hypervisor, VM, storage, and network layers.
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 5 years of virtualization or data center infrastructure experience.
- Proven experience operating enterprise virtualization environments and handling escalations.
- Prior technical leadership, mentoring, or coordination experience is preferred.
- VMware VCP or equivalent certification is an advantage.
Professional Competencies
- Clear technical leadership, communication, and decision-making skills.
- Strong ownership of service availability, security, and operational quality.
- Ability to prioritize work and coordinate across infrastructure teams.
- Structured approach to change control, documentation, and incident management.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Availability, stability, and performance of virtualization services.
- Incident resolution time and reduction of repeat platform issues.
- Accuracy of capacity forecasts and resource utilization improvements.
- Completion and quality of upgrades, patching, backup, and DR tests.
- Compliance with security, change management, and documentation standards.