<p>The Compute Infrastructure Planner shapes the design and capacity of an organisation's compute estate across cloud and on-premise platforms. This role balances long-term strategy with operational delivery, ensuring systems are resilient, cost-effective and aligned to business demand. The successful candidate will liaise with engineering, procurement and vendor teams to forecast needs and manage lifecycle activities.</p>
<h2>Compute Infrastructure Planner Job Profile</h2>
<p>The Compute Infrastructure Planner is responsible for planning capacity, forecasting demand and specifying compute resources to meet performance and availability targets. This role leads resource modelling, procurement planning and guides hybrid cloud architecture.</p>
<p>Working within IT operations or infrastructure teams, the planner translates business roadmaps into pragmatic compute strategies, coordinates with data centre teams and ensures compliance with security and environmental standards.</p>
<h2>Compute Infrastructure Planner Job Description</h2>
<p>The Compute Infrastructure Planner develops and maintains capacity models for servers, virtual machines and container platforms, estimating compute, memory and storage requirements over multiple time horizons. They evaluate cloud and on-premise options, propose cost-optimised solutions and produce capacity forecasts to support budgeting and procurement cycles.</p>
<p>The role involves close collaboration with architects, site operations and procurement to manage hardware lifecycles, vendor selection and contract renewals. The planner creates clear documentation and capacity dashboards, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions about scaling, migration and decommissioning.</p>
<p>In addition, the planner advises on performance tuning, tagging and resource governance to prevent resource sprawl and ensure SLAs are met. They contribute to disaster recovery planning and help assess the impact of new services or product launches on compute demand.</p>
<h2>Compute Infrastructure Planner Duties and Responsibilities</h2>
<ul>
<li>Develop and maintain multi-year capacity plans for cloud and on-premise compute resources.</li>
<li>Produce regular compute forecasts and scenario analyses to inform budgeting and procurement.</li>
<li>Specify hardware and virtual resource requirements and prepare tender documentation for suppliers.</li>
<li>Coordinate hardware lifecycle activities, including procurement, deployment and decommissioning.</li>
<li>Monitor utilisation metrics and produce dashboards to highlight trends and risks.</li>
<li>Work with architects to evaluate hybrid cloud architectures and migration strategies.</li>
<li>Optimise resource allocation to reduce costs and prevent overprovisioning.</li>
<li>Ensure compute designs meet security, compliance and environmental standards.</li>
<li>Support incident and capacity-related escalations with data-driven analysis.</li>
<li>Engage with vendors and negotiate commercial terms where required.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Compute Infrastructure Planner Requirements and Qualifications</h2>
<ul>
<li>Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related discipline, or equivalent experience.</li>
<li>Proven experience in capacity planning, infrastructure design or data centre operations.</li>
<li>Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and hybrid environments.</li>
<li>Strong analytical skills with experience in capacity modelling and forecasting tools.</li>
<li>Understanding of server hardware, virtualisation technologies and container orchestration.</li>
<li>Experience in procurement processes, vendor management and hardware lifecycle planning.</li>
<li>Excellent communication skills with the ability to present complex data to stakeholders.</li>
<li>Knowledge of performance monitoring tools and a data-driven approach to problem-solving.</li>
<li>Ability to work collaboratively across technical and commercial teams and manage multiple priorities.</li>
<li>Professional certifications in cloud platforms or ITIL are advantageous.</li>
</ul>