Cloud Engineer at Pro Contract Jobs Ltd, Southampton, £500 per day

Location: Southampton/ London
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 (2–3 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 You’ll 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 2–3 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.
• Interest in standardising solutions and improving service quality through lessons learned and continuous improvement.