Cloud Engineer jobs in United Kingdom

Security Cleared Site Reliability Engineer - Contract Outside IR35 - 3 months+ - Hybrid

We are seeking a Lead Operations/Site Reliability Engineer to take ownership of day-to-day operations across a legacy technology estate. The role will focus on maintaining service stability, ensuring operational readiness, and leading the response to incidents and outages. The Lead Operations/Site Reliability Engineer will play a pivotal role during the transition phase by embedding operational standards, improving monitoring and support processes, and enabling knowledge transfer into ongoing service delivery teams.

• Lead daily operational support of legacy systems, ensuring availability, performance, and resilience.
• Manage incident, problem, and change activities in line with ITIL and enterprise service standards. Proactively monitor and tune infrastructure, applications, messaging, and scheduling platforms.
• Act as the escalation point for critical incidents, coordinating technical resources to achieve rapid resolution. Lead root cause analysis and service improvement initiatives.
• Define and maintain runbooks, standard operating procedures, and operational documentation.
• Ensure backup, recovery, and disaster recovery processes are operationally tested and aligned to business needs.
• Oversee job scheduling, batch management, and automation activities (e.g., Tivoli Scheduler).
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Development, and Architecture teams to support upgrades, migrations, and modernisation efforts.
• Mentor operations engineers and manage knowledge transfer from discovery into business-as-usual operations.

• Technical background in Java, AWS and Kubernetes
• Customer Engagement management. Strong leadership and coordination skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Excellent analytical and diagnostic abilities, with a structured approach to discovery and documentation. Skilled in documenting processes, monitoring metrics, and reporting on operational health.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills for effective knowledge capture and handover. Excellent communication skills, particularly in high-pressure incident management situations.
• Ability to operate in both deep technical detail and higher-level architectural/system view.
• Analytical and detail-oriented, with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Incident Management, Resilient under pressure and effective at prioritising competing demands.

• Ability to prioritise effectively in a complex, multi-system environment.
• Technical skills in Java, AWS and Kubernetes
• Current and active SC Clearance
• Proven track record in managing/supporting enterprise-scale services.
• Experience of working in a multivendor environment, where co-ordination, triage and joint working is essential for operational activities.
• Familiarity with ITIL-aligned service management.
• Building KT libraries
• Previous involvement in system migrations, re-platforming, or legacy modernisation programmes highly desirable.
• Background in high-availability, disaster recovery, and enterprise integration patterns.