Network & Systems Manager

Contract:

Permanent, Full Time (35 hours per week)

Salary information: £45,650 - £50,860 per annum (including Inner London Weighting)

Guildhall School of Music & Drama is looking for an experienced, curious and ambitious Network & Systems Manager to join our Digital, Production & Venue Support (DPVS) team. This is a rare opportunity to take responsibility for an extraordinary technical environment at the heart of one of the world’s leading conservatoires. Guildhall’s students are exceptional young musicians, actors, production artists and makers, and our job within DPVS is to give them the facilities, systems and technical support that allow them to do their best work.

Behind that work sits a substantial and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure. Across more than 60 performance venues, studios, teaching spaces and classrooms, DPVS operates hundreds of interconnected audio, video, recording and broadcast devices, alongside an equipment inventory worth more than £2 million. We are looking for someone to help us lead, maintain and develop that environment.

As DPVS Network & Systems Manager, you will take day-to-day operational responsibility for the School’s specialist recording, broadcast and audio-visual systems and networks. That includes a large low-latency audio network, Dante Domain Manager, NDI video distribution, networked recording systems, specialist software, and the increasingly complex infrastructure that connects our studios, concert halls, theatres, teaching rooms and production spaces.

You will be somebody who enjoys getting beneath the surface of a system: diagnosing problems properly, understanding why something behaves the way it does, documenting it, improving it and making it more resilient. Just as importantly, this is not an IT role sitting at a distance from the work. You will be part of a busy, vibrant technical department supporting concerts, theatre productions, recording sessions, broadcasts, teaching, research and student-led work every day.

You might spend one morning investigating multicast behaviour or a Dante clocking issue and the afternoon working with engineers, academics or students to develop a completely new production workflow. You will work closely with our Recording & AV engineers, venue teams, academic departments and the School’s central IT colleagues, and will have considerable scope to influence how our infrastructure develops in the coming years.

We are deliberately interested in people from a wide range of technical backgrounds.

Perhaps you are currently a systems engineer in broadcast or live production and would like to bring that experience into a role with greater continuity, where you can build, refine and take long-term ownership of the systems you work with. Perhaps you have spent years touring and are looking for a little more routine without losing the technical complexity, live performance environment and sense of occasion that attracted you to the industry in the first place.

You might be a broadcast systems engineer, studio technical manager, media-network specialist, AV systems engineer, or someone working in higher education who wants to operate at a much greater technical scale.

We are less interested in where you learned your skills than in what you can do with them.

You will need substantial experience of professional audio, video or broadcast systems and a strong understanding of IP networking in a media environment. Experience with technologies such as Dante, NDI, and network administration will be particularly valuable, as will an understanding of recording studios, production workflows and integrated AV systems.

Knowledge of emerging media-over-IP technologies including ST 2110 would…