Contract: Bare Metal Platform Engineer & Orchestration Lead Start Date: ASAP Duration: 6 months Location: Yorkshire Rate: Negotiable (Deemed inside IR35 via Umbrella solution) Reference: 20233 Role Summary: Major IT Consultancy is seeking a Bare Metal Platform Engineer to be responsible for the technical engineering, industrialisation, and operational lifecycle of a clients global x86 estate. Unlike a traditional asset lead, this role focuses on abstracting hardware complexity through automation. You will be responsible for engineering the 'connective tissue' between vendor-specific management tools (iDRAC, iLO, XCC) and the clients core orchestration engines. The goal is to deliver 'Bare Metal as a Service' (BMaaS) by ensuring that Dell, HPE, and Lenovo hardware can be provisioned, managed, and observed as a unified, code-driven resource. Key Responsibilities: Unified Orchestration Engineering: Design and implement automation workflows that abstract vendor-specific tools (Lenovo XClarity, Dell OpenManage, HPE OneView) into a standardized management layer. Northbound Integration: Lead the integration of hardware management platforms with the Bank's Ansible and Terraform playbooks to enable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provisioning. Observability & Telemetry: Engineer the export of hardware health and performance metrics into OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and Prometheus to ensure unified monitoring across the heterogeneous fleet. ITSM & DDI Automation: Automate the end-to-end lifecycle from IP allocation (DDI/IPAM) to ServiceNow ticket generation for automated hardware break-fix and warranty tracking. Firmware & Security Compliance: Define and programmatically enforce 'Golden Baselines' for BIOS, RAID, and NIC settings, ensuring all assets meet the Bank's security control frameworks before being promoted to production. Audit & Evidence Engineering: Maintain immutable, automated audit trails for every hardware configuration change, replacing manual asset records with real-time 'state of the world' reporting. Key Skills & Experience: Multi-Vendor Hardware Deep-Dive: Expert-level knowledge of Dell PowerEdge (iDRAC), HPE ProLiant (iLO), and Lenovo ThinkSystem (XCC) hardware architectures. Protocol Mastery: Proficiency in hardware-level communication protocols, specifically Redfish API, IPMI, and SNMP for out-of-band management. Infrastructure as Code: Significant experience with Ansible (Roles/Collections) or Terraform for automating physical infrastructure deployments. DDI & Network Services: Working knowledge of DHCP, DNS, and IPAM (DDI) services and how they interact with PXE/iPXE boot sequences. Scripting & Development: Strong Python or Bash skills for building custom integration wrappers and data transformation tools. Operational Governance: Experience working in highly regulated or audit-driven environments, with a focus on automated evidence collection. Networking People (UK) is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.