AWS Migration Technical Lead
6 Month Contract
Location: UK - Remote
Rate: £750 - £800 per day (Inside IR35)

Skills: AWS, Datacentre migration, VMware, Terraform, Ansible, Migration Planning

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

This is a delivery-focused technical role for someone who has personally led complex production migrations from traditional datacentre environments into AWS. You will work alongside existing engineering teams, assess the automation already in place, identify what is usable and build or improve anything required to complete the migration safely and on time.

This is not 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 from the front.

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

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery of datacentre-to-AWS migrations across multiple production environments.
• Work directly with engineering teams to plan, build and execute migrations.
• Review existing migration tooling and automation to determine what is production-ready.
• Extend, repair or rebuild automation where gaps are identified.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across several parallel migration workstreams.
• Establish practical technical standards without creating unnecessary governance or delays.
• Make informed decisions around migration sequencing, re-platforming and technical risk.
• Identify and resolve infrastructure, application, licensing and dependency issues.
• Support teams that are less experienced with AWS, providing guidance and technical uplift.
• Own detailed cutover planning, including networking, DNS, data, access, validation and rollback.
• Lead migration rehearsals and production cutovers.
• Ensure customer-facing production services are migrated without avoidable disruption.
• Escalate technical and commercial blockers clearly to senior stakeholders.
• Provide concise reporting on progress, risks, decisions and delivery confidence.
• Support the safe decommissioning of Legacy datacentre infrastructure following migration.

Essential Experience

• Proven hands-on experience delivering complex datacentre-to-cloud migrations.
• Strong production-level AWS experience.
• Previous ownership of migration delivery from discovery and planning through to cutover.
• Strong knowledge of VMware and traditional datacentre infrastructure.
• Experience reviewing and improving existing infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible or equivalent automation tooling.
• 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 otherwise remediated.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure and application dependencies.
• Experience coordinating multiple engineering teams working on parallel migrations.
• Confidence making technical decisions under time pressure.
• Clear communication with engineers, delivery teams and senior stakeholders.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for key workshops, rehearsals or production cutovers.

Desirable Experience

• Experience delivering large-scale datacentre exit programmes.
• Migration of hosted software or SaaS platforms serving multiple customers.
• Experience working with public-sector, healthcare or other regulated production systems.
• Knowledge of both AWS and Azure migration environments.
• Experience supporting teams through cloud capability uplift.
• 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 sequencing and detailed engineering problems.
• Remains calm during high-pressure cutovers.
• Knows when to fix, rebuild, escalate or simplify.
• Can provide technical direction without becoming a bottleneck.