Available, seeking infrastructure & systems engineering roles

Joy Navanathan · London, UK

Infrastructure
is the job.
Delivery is how it lands.

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The story

How I got here

I came up through the estate rather than through a business degree: the front line, then bare metal, then the platform layer. Three jobs, one technical thread.

  1. 2019 to 2023

    Delaware North

    Starting on the front line

    I started out supporting the tills at big venues: stadiums, exhibition centres and transport hubs. If something breaks at kick-off you fix it there and then, because everyone can see it. It's where I learned to work calmly under time pressure.

    the takeaway Technical work is only as good as the operation it holds up.

  2. 2023 to 2025

    Generic Network Systems

    Down to the bare metal

    Then infrastructure for financial services clients, and the most hands-on the work has ever been: racking and commissioning hardware in data centres, building and hardening UNIX and Windows servers from nothing, standing up virtualisation, firewalls and identity. The migrations, office moves and DR builds came with it, which is where I learned to plan a cutover instead of improvising one.

    the takeaway You don't really know a system until you've built one from nothing.

  3. 2025 to 2026

    Walt Disney Travel Company

    Up to the platform layer

    At Disney I owned the transport-provider API estate behind the booking platform: live integrations with airlines, rail and ferry operators, releases end to end, and the incidents when a provider changed something at short notice. It's also where I learned to plan and land change at scale, across eight internal teams and as many vendors.

    the takeaway Knowing how to land a change is what lets you make big ones.

where that leaves me

An engineer who also knows
how to land the change

The last stretch taught me how to plan a change, get it agreed and put it live in a window without breaking anything. That's a genuinely useful thing for an infrastructure engineer to know. But it isn't the job I want to do all day. I want to be back in the estate: building it, hardening it, automating it, keeping it up. The delivery side just means I can be trusted with the migration as well as the rack.

Where I've worked

A short note on each company and what I was responsible for there. Pick a point on the timeline.

IT Support Specialist

Delaware North

Jan 2019 → Jul 2023United Kingdom

Delaware North is a global hospitality operator, running the food, retail and hospitality inside large venues: sports stadiums, exhibition centres and transport hubs. I supported the point-of-sale estate across a group of those sites, where the tills are the business and have a very narrow window in which to work. I stepped up as acting technical lead for a major event when both my manager and his deputy were unavailable, configuring the product catalogue, hospitality meal plans and till estate to a three-day deadline. I also automated deployments with PowerShell and wrote the documentation and user guides that cut repeat support load.

  • POS estate
  • Event operations
  • PowerShell automation
  • Asset & licence compliance

Systems & Operations Engineer

Generic Network Systems LLC

Jul 2023 → Aug 2025London, UK

Generic Network Systems is an IT infrastructure consultancy whose clients were global financial services firms, where maintenance windows are short and downtime isn't an option. This was the most hands-on the work has been: racking and commissioning enterprise hardware in data centres, building and hardening UNIX and Windows servers from bare metal, and standing up SQL Server environments with role-based access behind them. On top of that I led the projects: data centre migrations, office relocations and disaster recovery builds across UK, US and APAC time zones, plus the firewalls and identity estate around them. I owned UAT and regression testing for platform changes, writing the test plans and signing off go-live readiness with client stakeholders.

  • Data centre hardware
  • Server builds & hardening
  • SQL Server & RBAC
  • Disaster recovery
  • Entra ID / AD
  • Proxmox & VMware
  • Network security
  • Client sign-off

Technology Systems Executive

Walt Disney Travel Company · Disney Destinations

Aug 2025 → Jul 2026London, UK

The Walt Disney Travel Company sits inside Disney Destinations (the parks side of Disney rather than the films), selling Walt Disney World, Disneyland Paris and Disney Cruise Line holidays. I owned the transport-provider API estate inside the middle-layer booking platform behind those reservation sites: the SOAP and REST integrations connecting airlines, rail and self-drive operators into bookings for the UK market, thousands a month. That meant running releases end to end, holding the incident response when a provider changed something upstream, and root-causing failures across a platform I did not own all of. Around it I built the vendor and cross-functional governance from nothing, which is how the change actually landed across the UK, US and France.

  • SOAP & REST integration
  • Incident management
  • Release management
  • Root cause analysis
  • Regulated change
  • Vendor governance

What I'm certifying in

Two tracks, deliberately lopsided. The technical one is the job I want to be doing. The delivery one is already half-built and worth finishing.

Technical track · four in progress

The infrastructure ladder

Four, all in progress, taken in a deliberate order rather than collected: cloud, then Linux, then infrastructure as code, then orchestration.

the four, and why that order
  • AZ-104, Azure Administrator. Certifies what I already run: Entra ID, AD, hybrid identity.
  • RHCSA (EX200). Hands-on-the-terminal Linux, not multiple choice.
  • Terraform Associate. The real gap: infrastructure as code rather than by hand.
  • CKA. Last, and only after Terraform. The gate on most SRE postings.

why it matters to me → Six years of virtualisation, networking and identity, now declared in code. That's where these estates are heading.

Delivery track · in progress

PRINCE2

The one non-technical qualification I'm keeping, because infrastructure change in regulated environments is change control: migrations, DR tests and cutovers that need a plan, a rollback and a sign-off.

the parts I actually use
  • Manage by exception, so one engineer can hold several workstreams
  • Manage by stages, which gives a migration a real cutover gate
  • Focus on products: runbook, test plan and rollback as deliverables
  • Business justification, for replacing something before it fails

why it matters to me → Not because I want to be a project manager. Because the engineer who can write the change record and stand behind the go/no-go is the one you let near production on a Saturday night.

And what's behind me

The education, both finished.

2019 → 2023

B.Eng. (Hons) Computer Networks & Infrastructure Security

London Metropolitan University · London, UK

First Class Honours Completed alongside full-time employment: degree-level study running in parallel with a live POS estate.

2015 → 2018

BTEC Level 3 Diploma, Information Technology

Kingston College

Merit / Merit The vocational route in: systems, networking and programming taught as practice rather than theory. It's why my first instinct on any problem is still to go and look at the thing.

What I can do

The engineering is the job. The delivery discipline is what stops a migration turning into an outage.

the engineering

Infrastructure & Virtualisation

  • Data centre hardware
  • Bare-metal server builds
  • UNIX & Windows Server
  • Server hardening
  • Proxmox
  • VMware
  • Citrix XenApp
  • Microsoft SQL Server & RBAC
  • Disaster recovery

Cloud, Network & Identity

  • Azure / Entra ID & AD
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • pfSense
  • Palo Alto
  • Network security
  • Zabbix monitoring
  • Hybrid migration

Automation & Platform

  • PowerShell scripting
  • Deployment automation
  • System imaging
  • Runbooks & SOPs
  • Platform sustainment
  • SOAP & REST API integration
  • Payment processing
  • Root cause analysis
  • Technical documentation

what makes it land

Change & Release

  • Release management
  • Cutover planning
  • UAT & regression testing
  • Go-live readiness & sign-off
  • Rollback planning
  • Regulated change

Running an Estate

  • Incident management
  • Follow-the-sun operations
  • L1 to L3 support leadership
  • Application support
  • Helpdesk transformation
  • Asset & licence compliance
  • Mentoring

Working With People

  • Vendor management
  • Cross-functional engagement
  • Director-level escalation
  • Consulting on feasibility
  • Budget stewardship

What I'm looking for

Hands back on the estate. A role where the deliverable is a system that stays up, not a status report about one.

If that's the engineer
you're looking for

I'm London-based and open to roles in London, hybrid or fully remote. Happy to talk about on-call. Email is the fastest way to reach me, and I answer everything.

email · fastest hello@navanathan.co.uk
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Joy Navanathan
Joy Navanathan · London

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