Lead - Transformation Infrastructure

INSPIRE | EXHILARATE | DELIGHT

For over six decades, Chalhoub Group has been a partner and creator of luxury experiences in the Middle East. The Group, in its endeavour to excel as a hybrid retailer, has reinforced its distribution and marketing services with a portfolio of eight owned brands and over 300 international brands in the luxury, beauty, fashion, and art de vivre categories. More recently, the Group expanded its expertise into new categories of luxury watches, jewellery, and eyewear.

Every step at Chalhoub Group is taken with the customer at heart. Be it constantly reinventing itself or focusing on innovation to provide luxury experiences at over 750+ experiential retail stores, online and through mobile apps, each touch point leads to delighting the customer.

Today, Chalhoub Group stands for 14,000 skilled and talented professionals across seven countries, whose cohesive efforts have resulted in the Group being ranked third in the Middle East and first in Saudi Arabia as a Great Place to Work.

To keep the innovation journey going, the Group has set up “The Greenhouse”, which is not just an innovation hub, but also an incubator space and accelerator for start-ups and small businesses in the region and internationally. This is just one of the several initiatives taken by the Group to reinvent itself, catalysed by forward thinking and future-proofing. The Group has also been embedding sustainability at the core of its business strategy with a clear commitment towards people, partners and the planet, and by being a member of the United Nations Global Compact Community and signatory of the Women's Empowerment Principles.

What you'll be doing

This Infrastructure role is responsible for providing technical leadership and ensuring the successful implementation of the Infrastructure horizontal stream of the Transformation program.

Job Summary

• This position will be responsible for overseeing the infrastructure setup and management of the SAP S/4HANA system deployed on Microsoft Azure as part of the RISE with SAP initiative. The Infrastructure Lead will work closely with SAP and Microsoft to ensure the ERP infrastructure is properly configured and managed, and that all technical aspects related to connectivity, failover, and disaster recovery are handled efficiently.
• A critical element of this role is to ensure effective alignment of the ERP to the Group’s overall infrastructure approach, and this role will act as a ‘bridge’ between our central Infrastructure experts and the ERP Transformation program team
• This role will also take responsibility for managing the SLA and uptime performance of SAP (and Microsoft), and therefore will play a large role in ensuring effective monitoring of availability, reporting on performance and effective and ongoing vendor management
• This role requires strong experience in working with deploying enterprise systems onto hyperscalers (ideally experience in Azure) with demonstrated experience of network architecture, firewalls, connectivity, security and availability management
• The Infrastructure Lead will work closely with other functional business and tech leads, stakeholders, and end-users to ensure effective access to different user groups in different locations, testing of specifically intense workloads, to ensure that the infrastructure supports the needs of the program

• This role will align with functional technology streams in the program to ensure that the requirements of each functional area are effectively captured in this streams’ scope, and to ensure that dependencies required of functional streams are well managed into Infrastructure
• This role requires knowledge of ERP and enterprise systems, strong leadership capabilities, and excellent communication skills to work with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and vendors.

Infrastructure Design and Architecture:

• Lead the review of architecture of the infrastructure environment proposed by SAP and Microsoft required to support the ERP system
• Ensure that detailed infrastructure blueprints and architecture aligns with the ERP system’s technical and business requirements, including designing for scalability, ensuring the infrastructure can grow with business needs and accommodate future expansion
• Identify and flag key infrastructure design decisions that require validation or approval from Group technical stakeholders.
• Ensure all infrastructure-related decisions (e.g., network architecture, security models, resource sizing) are made with input from the right technical experts in the Group.
• Coordinate technical workshops with SAP, Microsoft, and Group stakeholders to ensure alignment on infrastructure design and implementation.

Infrastructure Setup and Configuration:

• Oversee and validate the configuration of the ERP infrastructure in Azure, ensuring that all technical and business requirements are met.
• Work closely with SAP and Microsoft to ensure the cloud environment is set up according to best practices and meets the organization’s performance and security needs.
• Monitor infrastructure delivery timelines, and ensure they are in sync with the broader project schedule.

Network and Connectivity Management:

• Lead the design and validation of the connectivity strategy, ensuring seamless integration between SAP S/4HANA and other systems within the organization
• Ensure the proper set up and configuration of firewalls, VPNs, and other security measures to protect infrastructure components and ensure secure connectivity.
• Implement load balancers, gateways, and network monitoring tools to ensure high availability and optimal performance

Infrastructure Testing, Failover, and Disaster Recovery:

• Lead infrastructure-related testing efforts, including performance testing, failover testing, and disaster recovery simulations. This includes location testing across different countries in the Group
• Collaborate with SAP and Microsoft to establish disaster recovery plans, ensuring that infrastructure failover capabilities are robust and tested.

• Ensure the backup and archiving strategy is clearly documented and put in place as part of the ERP program implementation
• Monitoring, Maintenance, and Troubleshooting:
• Oversee the monitoring setup for the cloud infrastructure, ensuring that proactive performance tracking is established
• Work with the DevOps Support Lead to ensure infrastructure monitoring and alerting is embedded into service management disciplines and ITSM tooling
• Regularly review performance metrics to ensure that SAP and Microsoft are meeting uptime and performance SLAs.
• Ensure that any performance or connectivity issues are quickly identified, escalated, and resolved with SAP and Microsoft.

Security and Compliance:

• Work with the Group InfoSec team and the Identify & Access Mgt Lead to ensure the relevant security policies and controls across the infrastructure are deployed, including identity and access management, encryption, and intrusion detection.
• Ensure the infrastructure complies with organizational security standards, industry regulations, and data protection laws (e.g., GDPR).

Legacy Archiving

• Lead the development, planning and execution of a legacy archiving strategy for the Group’s outgoing legacy ERP estate
• Ensure the data to be archived from decommissioned systems has clear access and retrieval protocols, should users or functions require access to ‘cold stored’ data
• Identify the cloud, application and support vendor requirements needed to deliver upon the legacy archiving strategy

Documentation and Knowledge Sharing:

• Maintain comprehensive documentation on the infrastructure setup, connectivity strategy, and disaster recovery plans.
• Ensure all infrastructure-related knowledge is effectively transferred to the appropriate teams for long-term maintenance and management.
• Organize and lead knowledge-sharing sessions with relevant teams to ensure ongoing infrastructure management aligns with best practices

What you’ll need to succeed

• Strong understanding of business processes and how they are supported by ERP systems.
• Experience working with Cloud Infrastructure deployments of large-scale enterprise systems
• Demonstrated experience working with infrastructure and connectivity for global organisations
• Ideally, would have experience of different infrastructure deployment models (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
• Experience working with SAP is desirable, more important is for experience of working with hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure
• Experience managing large hybrid teams comprised of internal and external resources
• Experience managing external vendors to a budget / target and ensuring close scope management
• Minimum of 8-10 years of experience in technology implementation and management.
• Proven experience as a technical lead or similar role in large-scale transformation programs

Behavioural skills and certification:

• Strong leadership and team management abilities
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Problem-solving and analytical skills
• Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
• Detail-oriented with a strong focus on quality.
• Proactive and self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership.
• Adaptable and able to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Committed to continuous learning and professional development.

Education and Professional Certification:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., PMP, ITIL, ERP certifications) is a plus

What we can offer you

With us,you will turn your aspirations into reality. We will help shape your journey through enriching experiences, learning and development opportunities and exposure to different assignments within your role or through internal mobility. Our Group offers diverse career paths for those who are extraordinary, every day.

We recognise the value that you bring, and we strive to provide a competitive benefits package which includes health care, child education contribution, remote and flexible working policies as well as exclusive employeediscounts.

We Invite All Applicants to Apply

It Takes Diversity Of Thought, Culture, Background, Differing Abilities and Perspectives to truly Inspire, Exhilarate and Delight our customers. At Chalhoub Group, we are committed to inclusion and diversity.

We welcome all applicants to apply and be part of our exciting future. We ensure equal opportunity for all our applicants without regard to gender, age, race, religion, national origin or disability status.