Senior Project Manager – Active Directory Service Consolidation


Company:	Government Recruitment Service
Salary:	£56,375 to £62,830 a year
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	York
Job type:	Permanent
Posting date:	27 Aug 2026
Closing date:	25 Sept 2026

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Summary

Defra is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting our world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Our broad remit means we play a major role in people's day-to-day life, from the food we eat, and the air we breathe, to the water we drink.

Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) is the trusted team for digital across the entire Defra Group.

We have around 1000 colleagues across DDTS and our ambition is to make it easier and faster than ever for people to interact with Defra. If you are ready to drive innovation and push boundaries, we want to hear from you. Join us and together we will create a great place for living, and a green and healthy future for all.

Find out more about DDTS:

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Defra Jobs

We are Government Digital and Data Candidate Information Pack V3 - 1

Join us as a Senior Project Manager – Shape the Future of Defra’s underpinning Technology!

We’re looking for someone who thrives on variety, enjoys solving complex problems, and wants to make a real difference in how people work across the Defra Group.

Our Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) function is at the heart of delivering smarter, more connected workplaces across the Defra Group. We’re looking for a Senior Project Manager to join our dynamic GIO Delivery Portfolio Team and drive innovation in a fast-paced, high-profile portfolio. The proposed resource will operate in a Project Manager capacity, providing end to end accountability for delivery, managing interdependencies, proactively addressing risks and maintaining alignment across stakeholders and delivery teams.

This work requires a Senior Project Manager to be accountable for:

Complex multi-supplier negotiation (removing rights from incumbent suppliers through commercial changes to contracts)
Holding new AD Management Supplier to delivery outcomes and fixed price costs
Withdrawal of privileged access across legacy contracts
Designing and embedding Tiered Administration boundaries
Ensuring readiness for live service (SDRB, SKMS, ServiceNow, CMDB)
Co-ordinating Active Directory recovery rehearsals. Defra currently has no specific supplier responsible for Active Directory backup and restores. This work would place a responsibility on the new supplier to do this AND to evidence this on an annual basis
Technical, security and operational leadership across a deeply federated supplier landscape

All of this forms part of continuous service lifecycle management within a complex, multi supplier environment.

To deliver success in this role the project manager will need to identify the dependencies across the existing supplier services and work across this complex environment, often with complicated relationships, challenging ownership externally as well as internally to define workable solutions whilst ensuring best value for Defra.

Benefits delivered by this role:

This role will deliver the establishment of Active Directory as a secure, governed and accountable enterprise service, with clear ownership, defined operating model and assured recovery capability.

Establish Active Directory as a formal Defra service for the first time.
Appoint a single Service Owner
Transition to one accountable supplier
Enforce a Tier0/Tier1/Tier2 administration model.
Eliminate excessive privileged access across five suppliers.
Implement consistent security patterns, immutable backups, and authoritative forest recovery
Deliver 100% domain controller telemetry into SOC.
Provide a secure and standardised operating model for AD.
Ensure BAU readiness, CMDB/SKMS updates and ServiceNow integration.

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