Location: Southampton/ London
Read the overview of this opportunity to understand what skills, including and relevant soft skills and software package proficiencies, are required.
Type: Contract
Rate/Salary: 500 per day
IR35 Status: Outside
Opportunity Snapshot
Cloud Engineer role supporting a UK Government Agency managed service within a high-performing engineering function.
Act as the primary engineering representative for cloud and on-prem infrastructure initiatives across assigned customer environments.
Hybrid working with regular onsite presence in the Southampton area (23 days per week).
Hands-on, customer-facing position with responsibility for incident visibility, escalation, pre-staging, and technical input into service reviews and roadmap discussions.
Key Focus Areas
Customer-facing engineering ownership: Serve as the cloud/on-prem technical point of contact for nominated customer accounts and environments.
Operational excellence: Maintain oversight of incidents, ensure timely communications, and drive resolution aligned with SLAs.
Hybrid infrastructure delivery: Support cloud deployments and hybrid rollouts through pre-staging, configuration, and scripting.
Risk and performance insight: Identify performance trends, emerging security threats, and vendor advisories that could impact service stability or compliance.
What Youll Be Responsible For
Act as the cloud engineering representative for assigned customer environments, advising on cloud and on-prem infrastructure topics.
Serve as an on-site escalation point for complex support issues and technical programmes, helping drive issues to closure.
Maintain proactive visibility of cloud service incidents and operational risks, ensuring effective escalation, stakeholder updates, and SLA alignment.
Provide insight-driven analysis across customer environments, identifying patterns such as recurring faults, capacity constraints, security concerns, and vendor bulletins.
Assist with, or lead, cloud pre-staging activities including virtual appliances, baseline configurations, build scripts, and deployment preparation for cloud/hybrid rollouts.
Attend and contribute to customer meetings such as support reviews, project roadmap sessions, monthly service reviews, and weekly incident management calls.
Collaborate with internal teams to deliver common solutions, standardise approaches, and improve runbooks and operational documentation.
Technical Environment
Cloud / Platform: Microsoft Azure and/or AWS (depending on customer estate)
Virtualisation: VMware and/or Hyper-V
Operating Systems: Windows and Linux server environments
Core Networking: Routing/switching fundamentals, connectivity and troubleshooting concepts relevant to hybrid infrastructure
Operations: Incident management, escalation, SLA-driven support, service reviews, and stakeholder reporting
Required Experience
Proven experience supporting public cloud and/or traditional on-prem infrastructure in a production environment.
Hands-on capability across one or more of the following: VMware, Hyper-V, Windows/Linux servers, Azure and/or AWS.
Solid understanding of core networking concepts and the ability to troubleshoot connectivity and infrastructure issues logically.
Strong verbal and written communication skills, with confidence engaging customers and collaborating with internal delivery teams.
Eligibility for SC Clearance (this is mandatory for the end-client environment).
Comfortable working in a hybrid model with onsite attendance 23 days per week in the Southampton region.
Ideal Personal Attributes
Proactive approach to operational ownership, with a mindset for prevention, not just response.
Calm and structured under pressure, especially during incident situations and escalations.
Collaborative style, able to work across support, engineering, projects, and customer stakeholders. xxuwjjq