Systems Engineer - AD Migration (Contract)
Posted 1 day ago by hedgehog lab
Negotiable
Undetermined
Remote
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary: The Systems Engineer (Active Directory Migration) role involves leading a critical migration of Active Directory within an AWS-hosted legacy environment. The position requires strong technical judgment and hands-on experience to ensure operational resilience and disaster recovery capabilities. The engineer will assess the current setup, design the target architecture, and execute the migration strategy. This is a contract position with remote-first working arrangements and occasional travel to Manchester.
Key Responsibilities:
- Assess and validate the current AD setup, risks, and dependencies.
- Design the target-state AD architecture and migration approach.
- Build a new consolidated AD environment in AWS.
- Migrate identities and services using a staged approach, preserving SIDs where required.
- Migrate an initial service as a blueprint, then scale across the remaining estate.
- Ensure AD supports reliable backup, recovery, and DR testing.
- Document decisions, risks, and runbooks clearly.
Key Skills:
- Strong hands-on experience with Active Directory migrations and consolidation.
- Deep knowledge of Windows Server and AD operations.
- Experience running Windows workloads in AWS (EC2).
- Proven ability to deliver high-risk infrastructure change safely.
- Experience migrating away from AWS Managed Microsoft AD (nice to have).
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (nice to have).
- AWS disaster recovery and backup experience (nice to have).
Salary (Rate): undetermined
City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Working Arrangements: remote
IR35 Status: undetermined
Seniority Level: undetermined
Industry: IT
Job title: Systems Engineer (Active Directory Migration) Location: UK (Remote-first) | Occasional travel: Manchester Type: Contract (initially 2-3 month with possible extension). We are hiring an experienced Systems Engineer to deliver a critical Active Directory migration within an AWS-hosted legacy estate. This work is essential to improving operational resilience and enabling disaster recovery testing across Windows-based services. You will take ownership of untangling a partially completed AD migration and leading the move to a single, well-managed Active Directory domain within our core AWS platform environment. This role requires strong technical judgement, not just execution.
What you’ll do
- Assess and validate the current AD setup, risks, and dependencies.
- Design the target-state AD architecture and migration approach.
- Build a new consolidated AD environment in AWS.
- Migrate identities and services using a staged approach, preserving SIDs where required.
- Migrate an initial service as a blueprint, then scale across the remaining estate.
- Ensure AD supports reliable backup, recovery, and DR testing.
- Document decisions, risks, and runbooks clearly.
What we’re looking for
- Essential
- Strong hands-on experience with Active Directory migrations and consolidation.
- Deep knowledge of Windows Server and AD operations.
- Experience running Windows workloads in AWS (EC2).
- Proven ability to deliver high-risk infrastructure change safely.
- Nice to have
- Experience migrating away from AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience.
- AWS disaster recovery and backup experience.
Ways of working Remote-first, with Manchester-based collaboration preferred where useful