Network Engineer - Contract

6 months contact with extensions for long term Must have Production Azure depth. Recent hands-on ownership of Azure VMs, storage, networking, identity/access and monitoring, alongside Windows Server, Active Directory, Entra ID, DNS and Hyper-V or comparable virtualization. Safe migration and recovery delivery. Personally delivered server or hybrid-cloud migrations, including dependency discovery, supported target design, testing, cutover and rollback. Practical backup and full-system restore-testing experience. Independent ownership and organization. Can enter a partly documented environment, prioritize several workstreams, track commitments, surface blockers early and deliver concise status, runbooks and knowledge transfer without continuous supervision. Infrastructure operations and security judgment. Troubleshoot production incidents; manage patching, certificates, capacity and alerts; apply least privilege and change controls. Collaborate with security specialists and vendors on approved changes. On-call readiness and automation. Participate in the infrastructure on-call rotation and agreed maintenance windows. Strong PowerShell troubleshooting/automation and clear communication during incidents. Nice to have Direct platform experience. Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Files, server retirement and hybrid identity migrations; Azure cost analysis and rightsizing. Security and monitoring integrations. Sentinel, Defender, Linux log collectors; practical experience resolving telemetry gaps and working with a managed security provider. Modern delivery tools. Terraform or Bicep and Git for repeatable infrastructure deployments and version-controlled scripts and configuration. Optional or bonus Adjacent capabilities. Purview/retention, Intune, cloud printing, Veeam backup and recovery (our new backup platform), Meraki or SD-WAN/VPN experience. AI-assisted automation experience. Strong practical use of approved AI tools to build and improve infrastructure scripts, automate repetitive tasks and accelerate troubleshooting, with tested outputs, human review and protection of company data.