Application Upgrade & Automation Engineer

Application Upgrade & Automation Engineer - SC Cleared Contract: Inside IR35 Location: London (Hybrid) Security Clearance: SC Clearance preferred or ability to obtain We are seeking an experienced SC Cleared Application Upgrade & Automation Engineer to join a leading Financial Systems & Solutions team. You will play a key part in delivering application upgrades, platform refreshes and automation initiatives across a complex enterprise estate. You will work closely with application, infrastructure and engineering teams to ensure business-critical systems remain secure, supported and aligned to future technology roadmaps. This is an excellent opportunity for an engineer with strong Windows and Linux administration experience, coupled with a passion for automation, DevOps practices and continuous improvement. Key Responsibilities Plan, coordinate and deliver application upgrades, migrations and platform refresh activities. Ensure applications remain compliant with vendor support and security requirements. Administer and support enterprise applications hosted across Windows and Linux environments. Troubleshoot application, middleware and infrastructure-related issues. Produce and maintain operational documentation, support procedures and runbooks. Identify opportunities to automate manual operational processes and improve efficiencies. Develop automation solutions using PowerShell, Bash, Python, Ansible or similar technologies. Design, build and maintain CI/CD deployment pipelines. Promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps best practices across engineering teams. Essential Skills & Experience Strong experience supporting and administering enterprise applications across both Windows and Linux platforms. Proven experience delivering application upgrades, migrations and platform refresh programmes in production environments. Hands-on scripting and automation experience using PowerShell, Bash, Python or similar technologies. Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible. Strong understanding of application servers, middleware technologies and databases. Excellent troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills. Experience working within large-scale enterprise or regulated environments. Desirable Experience Experience integrating Artifactory, Xray and SonarQube into CI/CD pipelines. Knowledge of application release management and repository governance. Experience designing and maintaining GitHub Actions pipelines. Exposure to monitoring and observability platforms. Experience working within financial services, government, defence or other highly regulated sectors. If you have a strong background in enterprise application support, automation, platform upgrades and DevOps tooling, we'd love to hear from you.