Information Technology Operations Engineer

An IT operations engineer keeps the systems an organisation already runs working properly - servers, networks, cloud services, user accounts, backups and the monitoring that tells you when something has broken. The job is a mix of responding to things going wrong, making routine changes safely, and gradually automating away repetitive work. You do it for internal colleagues in a large organisation, or for external clients if you work for an IT services provider or managed service provider (a company other firms pay to run their IT for them).

Starting salary: £24k–£32k
Live graduate jobs: Search all jobs
Main way in: Graduate schemes in technology at large employers
They usually ask for: A degree is usually expected for graduate schemes but the…

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £24,000–£32,000 to start, though this varies a lot - London and finance, defence or cloud-focused roles sit at the upper end or above it, while regional IT services providers and public sector roles often start lower. Shift allowances and on-call payments can add meaningfully on top, and salaries tend to rise quickly once you have a year or two of hands-on experience and a cloud certification.

What you'd actually do

Picking up tickets that have been escalated from a service desk - a shared drive nobody can reach, a server running out of disk space, an application that has started timing out - and working out whether the cause is the network, the server, the application or the user's device
Watching monitoring and alerting dashboards (tools that continuously check whether systems are up and raise an alarm when they are not), and acting on alerts before users notice the problem
Carrying out planned changes in evening or weekend maintenance windows - patching operating systems, upgrading firmware, migrating a service to a new server - and having a rollback plan if it goes wrong
Writing and tidying up scripts, usually PowerShell, Bash or Python, to automate jobs you'd otherwise do by hand: creating user accounts, checking certificate expiry dates, cleaning up log files

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Building and configuring infrastructure - spinning up virtual machines, setting up cloud resources in Azure or AWS, configuring backups, adding a new site to the network
Updating documentation and runbooks so the next person on shift can fix the same problem without ringing you, and handing over open issues at the end of a shift
Joining incident calls when something significant is down, giving status updates, and afterwards writing up what happened and what will stop it recurring

How graduates get in

Graduate schemes in technology at large employers - banks, insurers, retailers, telecoms, utilities, the NHS and central government departments all run them. These often rotate you through infrastructure, service management, security and applications before you specialise.
Direct entry as a junior or associate IT operations engineer, advertised without a scheme attached. This is very common and in many ways the more typical route - smaller employers and IT services providers hire this way all year round rather than in an annual cycle.
Starting on a service desk or as a 1st/2nd line support analyst and moving up. This is extremely common and nothing to be sniffy about - it teaches you how systems actually fail and how users describe problems, and a year or two there is often the quickest route into an operations team.
Degree apprenticeships and higher apprenticeships in digital and technology solutions or network engineering - these are an alternative to a degree rather than a graduate route, but some graduates do enter via apprenticeship-style training programmes.

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Conversion from a non-computing degree, usually by self-funding a vendor certification (such as a cloud fundamentals or networking certificate), building a home lab, and applying to support or junior operations roles. Workable but slower; you'll usually start at support level.
Industrial placement years and summer internships in infrastructure or IT services, which frequently convert into graduate offers at the same employer.

What employers ask for

A degree is usually expected for graduate schemes but the subject matters less than you'd think. Computer science, networking, software engineering and information systems are the obvious fits, and a few employers insist on them, but plenty hire maths, physics, engineering and other numerate graduates - and some take any discipline if you can show genuine technical interest.
Grades vary widely. Larger graduate schemes often ask for a 2:1 and sometimes UCAS points or specific A-level grades; direct-entry junior roles and IT services providers frequently ask only for a 2:2 or simply 'a degree', and some drop the degree requirement entirely in favour of experience.
Demonstrable hands-on experience counts heavily - a home lab, a self-hosted server, a Raspberry Pi project, running infrastructure for a student society, or a placement year. For direct-entry roles this often matters more than your degree classification.
Vendor certifications are valued but rarely required at entry: common ones include Microsoft Azure Fundamentals and Administrator Associate, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate, CompTIA Network+ and A+, and Cisco CCNA. Many employers will fund these once you're in. ITIL Foundation (a widely used framework for how IT services are managed) is often picked up in the first year.

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A full UK driving licence is sometimes needed where the role covers multiple sites, and security clearance (BPSS, SC or occasionally DV) is required for defence, government and some critical national infrastructure work - this can mean residency requirements and a wait before you start.
Willingness to take part in an on-call rota or shift pattern is often stated explicitly, because the systems need covering outside office hours.

Skills that matter

Structured troubleshooting

Most of the job is narrowing down where a fault sits from vague symptoms, and the engineers who do this well work through layers methodically rather than guessing and restarting things.

Scripting and automation (PowerShell, Bash or Python)

Operations teams are judged on how much repetitive work they have eliminated, and a script that provisions accounts correctly every time is worth more than someone doing it manually.

Networking fundamentals - DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, routing, firewalls

A large share of 'the application is broken' incidents turn out to be name resolution, a firewall rule or a certificate, and you cannot diagnose those without understanding how traffic actually moves.

Operating system administration, usually Windows Server and Linux

You're reading logs, checking services and permissions, and applying patches on these platforms constantly, so comfort at the command line is non-negotiable.

Writing clearly for two audiences at once

You have to explain an outage to a non-technical manager who wants to know when it'll be fixed, and leave a runbook precise enough for a colleague at 3am to follow without you.

Change discipline and risk awareness

Most serious outages are caused by someone's well-intentioned change, so knowing to test, schedule, document and plan a rollback is what separates a reliable engineer from a dangerous one.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate or junior operations engineer - heavily supervised, working alerts and escalated tickets, shadowing on changes and learning the estate. Typically the first one to two years, though structured schemes run to a fixed length while direct-entry roles have no set timetable.
Operations or infrastructure engineer (sometimes '2nd line' then '3rd line') - you own changes end to end, lead on a platform area such as cloud, networking, virtualisation or backup, and are a named escalation point. Most people reach this within a few years, but it depends entirely on how much the employer lets you touch.
Senior engineer or specialist - deep expertise in one domain, designing rather than just implementing, mentoring juniors and acting as technical authority during major incidents.
From there the paths genuinely fork. Common destinations include site reliability engineering or DevOps/platform engineering (closer to software development, with automation and cloud at the centre), cloud or infrastructure architecture, cyber security operations, or a move into management as an infrastructure team lead or IT service manager.
Longer term, some move into head of infrastructure or IT director roles, and others into consultancy or pre-sales technical roles at vendors and IT services firms. Timelines here vary enormously and depend far more on employer size and your own specialisation choices than on years served.

What people get wrong

“It's the same thing as IT support - fixing laptops and resetting passwords.”

Support deals with individual users and their devices; operations deals with the shared systems behind them - servers, networks, cloud platforms, backups. The two sit next to each other and many people start in support, but an operations engineer's bad day affects hundreds of people at once, not one.

“It's a dead-end job that automation will eliminate.”

Automation is largely what the job has become. The manual, repetitive parts have been scripted away and the role has shifted towards building and maintaining that automation - which is exactly why it feeds so directly into site reliability and platform engineering, some of the better-paid technical work around.

“You spend your time alone with machines, so people skills don't matter much.”

A lot of the work is coordination - telling a frustrated business manager what's happening, negotiating a maintenance window with a team that doesn't want downtime, chasing a third-party supplier, handing over cleanly at shift change. Engineers who can't do this get stuck.

“You need a computer science degree.”

Many operations engineers don't have one. Employers care more about whether you've actually built and broken things, and certifications plus a home lab can substitute for the degree subject - though a few of the larger graduate schemes do screen on it.

Where this varies

The title covers quite different jobs depending on where you land. At a large bank, retailer or government department you'll work on an in-house estate with formal change control, documented processes and a defined on-call rota - slower-moving, more procedural, often better structured training. At a managed service provider or IT consultancy you'll juggle several client environments at once, which means broader exposure quickly but more pressure from service level agreements and less depth in any one system. In a start-up or smaller company you may be the whole IT function, doing everything from laptops to cloud architecture with nobody to escalate to. There's also a growing split between traditional infrastructure roles (physical servers, datacentres, on-premises networks - still very much alive in healthcare, manufacturing, defence and local government) and cloud-native roles where you rarely touch hardware and the work looks much more like software engineering. Hours vary too: some roles are standard office hours with occasional on-call, others are genuine 24/7 shift patterns including nights.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.