Role Title: Infrastructure Engineer (SC Cleared)
Duration: 12 Months
Location: London or Bristol (80% Remote)
Rate: £750-£850p/d via Umbrella
The successful candidate will be a British national and will hold security clearance
Overview:
Working within an agile digital delivery team developing and supporting a mission critical application for the UK Defence, with instances hosted on both a secure cloud platform (AWS) and on VMs hosted a highly secure managed on-prem hosting environment. The application is extant and Live. You are to be the senior infrastructure engineer managing and maintaining the infrastructure and network layer across the environments hosting this application, including maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IAC), deployment automation, improving and ensuring scalability, stability, availability and security of the infrastructure/environments. You will have experience working with secure Cloud platform infrastructure (specifically AWS), secure on-prem hosting environments (virtualised on VMWare), containerised applications (Kubernetes and Docker), administering and patching applications and Operating Systems, configuring and maintaining networking infrastructure. You will be comfortable using the supporting tools for Agile product delivery such as JIRA (User Story / Defect / Task Management), Confluence (Documentation / Comms), and Slack (collaboration / comms).
Key Responsibilities
* Manage and evolve Kubernetes clusters and associated components (etcd, kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kubelet).
* Maintain overlay networking (Calico, kube-proxy) and ingress/mesh (Traefik, Istio) for secure, reliable service communication.
* Implement and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Pulumi for AWS and on-prem resources.
* Configure and manage networking infrastructure, including firewalls, VPNs, and access controls.
* Support GitOps workflows with Argo CD and Argo Rollouts for progressive delivery.
* Manage VMware-based on-prem environments, liaising with client teams for provisioning and patching.
* Ensure secure configuration and patching of OS and infrastructure components
* Monitor system health, capacity, and performance using tools like Grafana
* Manage backup and recovery solutions
* Troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure-related incidents and participate in change management processes.
* Collaborate with developers, DevSecOps, and test engineers to ensure platform reliability and compliance.
Essential Technical Skills
* Cloud & Virtualization
o AWS (EKS, IAM, S3, networking)
o VMware (on-prem virtualization)
* Containerization & Orchestration
o Kubernetes (EKS Auto Mode), containerd, Docker
o Service mesh (Istio), ingress controllers (Traefik)
* Infrastructure as Code
o Pulumi (YAML, Go, Python)
* Networking
o Calico, kube-proxy, VPNs, firewalls, routing
* Secrets & Certificates
o Vault, External Secrets Operator, cert-manager
* Observability
o Grafana
* CI/CD & GitOps
o GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts
* OS & Security
o Linux, patching cycles, CVE monitoring
* Database Awareness
o PostgreSQL
