Job Description

AWS Technical Lead
6 Month Contract
Location: UK – Remote
Rate: £750 – £800 per day, Inside IR35

Skills: AWS, Datacentre Migration, VMware, Terraform, Ansible, Migration Planning, Production Cutovers

We are looking for a hands-on AWS Technical Lead to take technical ownership of a major datacentre exit programme.

The role will involve leading the migration of multiple production environments from traditional VMware-based datacentre infrastructure into AWS. You will work closely with existing engineering teams, assess the tooling and automation already in place, and identify what needs to be improved or built to complete the migrations safely and on time.

This is a delivery-focused technical role rather than an enterprise architecture, cloud strategy or programme management position. You will be expected to get into the technical detail, make practical decisions, unblock engineering teams and lead critical migration and cutover activity.

The programme includes several production workloads being migrated in parallel, including a business-critical platform supporting more than 100 customers. All in-scope environments must be migrated ahead of a fixed datacentre exit deadline.

Key Responsibilities

• Take technical ownership of datacentre-to-AWS migrations across multiple production environments.
• Work directly with engineering teams to plan, build and execute migrations.
• Review existing infrastructure, tooling and automation to determine what is ready for production use.
• Improve, extend or rebuild automation where gaps are identified.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across several parallel migration workstreams.
• Make practical decisions around migration sequencing, rehosting, re-platforming and technical risk.
• Identify and resolve infrastructure, application, networking, licensing and dependency issues.
• Support and guide engineering teams with varying levels of AWS experience.
• Own detailed migration and cutover planning, including networking, DNS, data, access, validation and rollback.
• Lead migration rehearsals and production cutovers.
• Ensure customer-facing services are migrated with minimal disruption.
• Escalate technical and delivery blockers clearly to senior stakeholders.
• Provide concise updates on progress, risks, decisions and delivery confidence.
• Support the safe decommissioning of legacy datacentre infrastructure following migration.

Essential Experience

• Strong hands-on AWS engineering experience within complex production environments.
• Proven experience delivering datacentre-to-cloud migrations.
• Previous technical ownership of migrations from discovery and planning through to cutover.
• Strong knowledge of VMware and traditional datacentre infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible or equivalent automation tools.
• Experience reviewing, improving or rebuilding existing infrastructure automation.
• Strong understanding of networking, DNS, access, data movement and rollback planning.
• Experience migrating business-critical production applications with strict availability requirements.
• Ability to assess whether workloads should be rehosted, re-platformed or remediated.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure and application dependencies.
• Experience coordinating or technically leading multiple engineering teams.
• Confidence making technical decisions under pressure.
• Clear communication with engineers, delivery teams and senior stakeholders.

Desirable Experience

• Experience delivering large-scale datacentre exit programmes.
• Migration of hosted software or SaaS platforms supporting multiple customers.
• Experience within public-sector, healthcare or regulated environments.
• Knowledge of both AWS and Azure migration environments.
• Experience helping engineering teams improve their cloud capability.
• Familiarity with licensing, commercial and third-party constraints during migration programmes.

This Role Will Suit Someone Who

• Leads by doing rather than producing strategy documents.
• Is comfortable reviewing partially completed work and forming an independent technical view.
• Can move between high-level migration planning and detailed engineering problems.
• Remains calm during high-pressure rehearsals and production cutovers.
• Knows when to fix, rebuild, simplify or escalate.
• Can provide technical direction without becoming a bottleneck.