Location: Hybrid – 2 days per week in Sheffield office to start (may reduce once established)

Overview We are seeking an experienced Infrastructure Engineer (Virtualisation) to join a leading financial services organisation on a contract basis. You will design, build, and support enterprise virtualisation platforms across on-premises and hybrid environments, ensuring stability, performance, and regulatory compliance.

This role is key to maintaining secure, resilient, and cost-effective infrastructure, enabling application and platform teams to deliver change safely.

Responsibilities Virtualisation Platform Engineering & Operations Build, operate, and maintain enterprise virtualisation platforms (VMware vSphere/ESXi, Hyper-V).

Provide day‑2 operational support: monitoring, troubleshooting, performance tuning, capacity optimisation.

Execute patching, upgrades, firmware updates, and hardware lifecycle activities.

Ensure high availability, clustering, failover, and recovery mechanisms.

Platform Lifecycle & Capacity Management Own platform lifecycle processes: build standards, upgrades, decommissioning, technical refreshes.

Conduct capacity planning and forecasting to meet business demand.

Identify and remediate single points of failure; support disaster recovery testing.

Automation & Standardisation Develop and maintain automation for provisioning and configuration (scripting/Infrastructure as Code).

Standardise virtualisation builds, templates, and configurations.

Support integration with cloud and container platforms in hybrid delivery models.

Incident, Problem & Change Management Act as escalation point for complex incidents.

Perform root cause analysis and implement preventive actions.

Support controlled change execution following ITIL processes.

Security, Risk & Compliance Ensure platforms meet security standards, hardening guidelines, and regulatory requirements.

Support audits with documentation and operational evidence.

Manage vulnerabilities, configuration drift, and access controls.

Collaboration & Documentation Work closely with storage, network, OS, cloud, and application teams.

Provide technical input for designs and onboarding.

Maintain documentation, runbooks, and operational procedures.

Essential Required Skills & Experience

Experience with enterprise virtualisation (VMware vSphere/ESXi/vCenter or equivalent).

Proven infrastructure engineering or platform operations experience in enterprise environments.

Hands-on with upgrades, patching, performance tuning, troubleshooting.

Knowledge of server hardware, storage, and networking related to virtualisation.

ITIL-aligned operational experience.

Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and documentation skills.

Desirable Experience in financial services or regulated industries.

Scripting/automation experience (PowerShell, Python) and Infrastructure-as-Code.

Knowledge of hybrid integration between virtualisation, cloud, and containers.

Disaster recovery/business continuity experience.

Personal Attributes Ownership and accountability for platform stability.

Ability to work in global, multi-disciplinary teams.

Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Proactive, focused on continuous improvement and risk reduction.