Data & Migration Automation Engineer

Thorn SDS Limited; Hereford; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days Annual Leave

Employer Pension Contributions

Group Life Insurance

Wellbeing Services

Octopus EV Salary Sacrifice

Training & Personal Development

Job summary

Thorn SDS Limited is seeking a Data and Migration Engineer to automate migrations, build reusable tooling and ensure reliable execution within a secure enterprise platform. You will automate discovery, data migration, and platform integration across VMware, PowerScale and PowerFlex ecosystems.

Join a collaborative, agile team delivering repeatable workflows, containerised tooling and CI/CD pipelines while maintaining governance and security controls in a high‑security UK environment.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and developing automation using Ansible, Python, Bash/PowerShell or similar languages, including APIs and error handling.
• Applying software delivery practices, including version control, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
• Delivering migration and synchronisation tasks, validating data completeness and integrity throughout.
• Working with virtualization, enterprise storage, permissions and infrastructure dependencies.
• Supporting containerised tooling, monitoring, logging and technologies such as Kubernetes and persistent storage.
• Troubleshooting complex integration issues across platforms, adapting to unfamiliar technologies and communicating findings clearly.
• Working with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), Dell PowerScale, Dell PowerFlex, Terraform and Elastic Stack.
• Managing container builds, image registries, software repositories and controlled artefact promotion.
• Supporting Windows/Linux, databases, file and object storage, directory services and dependency mapping.
• Planning migration rehearsals, synchronisation, cutover and recovery activities to minimise disruption.
• Working in secure or restricted-connectivity environments, supporting metadata, cataloguing, archiving and records management.
• Producing technical documentation to support implementation, governance and ongoing support.
• Maintaining engineering and security standards while keeping up with industry developments and building effective working relationships.

Responsibilities

• Automate live inventory discovery and inventory refreshes, highlighting changes and information gaps while retaining source traceability.
• Support discovery of high level data migration requirements for each application set and their dependencies populating a Migration Passport.
• Design, build and integrate scripts, frameworks, pipeline templates and runbooks for the shared migration fabric.
• Enable non-production rehearsals and safely rerunnable workflows, with recovery controls and controlled promotion of tested tooling.
• Automate integration with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), NSX, Dell PowerScale and Dell PowerFlex through agreed interfaces, accounting for storage mapping, permissions, metadata, capacity and performance.
• Develop containerised tooling and repeatable Kubernetes deployments; integrate CI/CD, infrastructure as code and image repositories.
• Automate builds, tests, dependency versioning, security checks and artefact promotion, maintaining traceability and access controls.
• Integrate platform monitoring and logging to automate progress reporting, diagnostics and evidence capture.
• Automate source-to-target reconciliation using counts, volumes and checksums with item-level checks where needed.

Skills

Ansible

Python

Bash/PowerShell

APIs

Error handling

Version control

Code reviews

Automated testing

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Migration

Virtualization

Enterprise storage

Permissions

Infra dependencies

Containerisation

Monitoring

Logging

Kubernetes

Persistent storage

VMware Cloud Foundation

Dell PowerScale

Dell PowerFlex

Terraform

Elastic Stack

Image registries

Binary repositories

Windows

Linux

Databases

File storage

Object storage

Directory services

Dependency mapping

Migration planning

Tools

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)

Dell PowerScale

Dell PowerFlex

Terraform

Elastic Stack

Image registries

Binary repositories

Job description

Thorn SDS Limited is seeking a Data and Migration Engineer to automate migrations, build reusable tooling and ensure reliable execution within a secure enterprise platform. You will automate discovery, data migration, and platform integration across VMware, PowerScale and PowerFlex ecosystems.

Join a collaborative, agile team delivering repeatable workflows, containerised tooling and CI/CD pipelines while maintaining governance and security controls in a high‑security UK environment.