Job Description: IKP Platform Engineer (Kubernetes + Automation)

Rate: Up to £500 per day (Inside IR35)

Location: Sheffield - (3 days in office)

Duration: 6 month contract

Role Overview:

The IKP Engineering Team is responsible for the end-to-end operation, automation and enhancement of a large-scale hybrid server estate supporting business-critical workloads. This is a mixed engineering role, where team members contribute across fulfilment, implementation, platform maintenance, automation, and continuous improvement activities.

The engineer will work across a broad technical landscape including 9,000+ virtual machines, 3,000+ physical Servers, and large Kubernetes-based environments-requiring strong hands-on skills and the ability to operate cloud-native platforms at scale.

Key Responsibilities:

• Deliver engineering, fulfilment and operational tasks across the IKP platform-no dedicated silos; all engineers support the full life cycle.
• Operate and maintain large-scale Kubernetes (K8s) environments, ensuring reliability, performance and proactive platform hygiene.
• Perform hands-on implementation and configuration changes, including production changes during weekends when required.
• Automate operational and fulfilment tasks to drive efficiency and reduce manual effort using:
• Python
• Ansible
• GitHub
• Jira
• Jenkins
• Supporting DevOps/CI-CD tooling.
• Contribute to troubleshooting, incident resolution, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement of platform stability.
• Drive adoption of automation-first practices across engineering activities, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments.
• Work collaboratively with cross-functional teams (cloud, network, OS, DevOps, SRE, and application teams) to support end-to-end delivery.
• Ensure all changes and deployments follow governance, standards and compliance processes.

Required Skills & Experience:

Core Technical Skills:

• Strong, real hands-on Kubernetes skills (not managed/cloud K8s services).
• Ability to operate, configure, maintain and troubleshoot clusters deployed on physical/VM infrastructure.
• Solid experience supporting cloud-native environments using on-prem or hybrid deployment models.
• Strong automation experience using:
• Ansible
• Python
• GitHub/Git
• CI/CD tools (Jenkins or similar)
• Good understanding of Linux system engineering, networking fundamentals and container ecosystem tools.

Engineering & Operational Skills:

• Ability to work across fulfilment and engineering tasks-flexible to take on any required technical activity.
• Experience implementing production changes, ideally in large enterprise environments.
• Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills across infrastructure, platform and automation layers.
• Ability to document, improve and standardise engineering procedures and automated workflows.

Preferred/Good-to-Have:

• Experience operating large, mixed server estates (eg, 9K VM + 3K physical).
• Exposure to hybrid cloud, infrastructure migration or modernisation programmes.
• Familiarity with enterprise change management and regulated environment delivery.

Ways of Working:

• "Everyone does everything" culture-shared responsibility across fulfilment, automation, engineering and operations.
• Flexible to support weekend changes and critical production deployments.
• Proactive mindset, strong ownership and readiness to uplift automation maturity.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.
Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.