Solaris Migration Engineer (Legacy Modernisation & Cloud Transformation)

About Us :

Location: Remote (UK-based) On-site attendance required only during key migration/cutover events

Type: Contract or Permanent

Clearance: SC cleared or must be eligible for SC

Travel: Occasional UK on-site activity for hands-on migration execution and validation

Role Summary :

We are looking for a highly experienced Solaris Migration Engineer to support the transformation of large, complex legacy Solaris environments into modern cloud-based platforms using AWS and Stromasys (CHARON) SPARC emulation. This role is remote-first but requires on-site presence during major cutovers, migration weekends and outage windows.

You will lead discovery, remediation, tooling development, migration execution and post-migration validation for mission-critical workloads. The ideal engineer has deep Solaris knowledge, proven migration delivery experience, and the discipline required to execute high-risk go-live events.

Key Responsibilities :Migration Leadership & Execution

• Lead end-to-end Solaris migration activities from physical SPARC hardware to AWS-backed Stromasys CHARON environments.
• Perform on-site activities only when required for physical validation, data sync, cutover, or hardware assessments.
• Execute migrations during weekend schedules, planned outages and critical change windows.

Runbooks, Tooling & Documentation

Create, maintain and own highly detailed migration runbooks, including:

• Pre-migration checks
• Data sync procedures
• Cutover steps
• Back-out/rollback plans
• Validation & smoke testing

Develop and refine migration tooling, automation scripts and utilities to streamline repetitive tasks.

Technical Delivery

• Conduct deep-dive discovery and assessment of legacy Solaris workloads.
• Identify and remediate blockers such as OS constraints, obsolete libraries, storage differences and compatibility issues.
• Work with cloud, network, storage and architecture teams to design end-to-end target-state solutions.
• Validate performance and behaviour of workloads inside Stromasys CHARON emulation on AWS.
• Ensure security, resilience, compliance and operational readiness for all migrated services.

Experience Required :Solaris Expertise

• Strong Solaris 10/11 administration, tuning, troubleshooting and legacy hardware knowledge (SPARC, storage subsystems, networking).
• Experience supporting large-scale or business-critical Solaris estates.

Migration Delivery

• Mandatory experience delivering Solaris migrations in structured, controlled change environments.
• Proven track record executing migrations in weekend/outage windows, following strict runbooks.
• Experience writing and owning end-to-end migration runbooks.

Cloud & Emulation

• Experience migrating workloads into AWS (EC2, EBS, networking, security groups, IAM, landing zones).
• Knowledge of or exposure to Stromasys CHARON SPARC emulation (highly desirable).
• Understanding of cloud-hosted legacy system behaviour, performance baselining and risk mitigation.

Tooling & Automation

• Strong scripting and automation experience (Bash/KSH, Python, Perl or similar).
• Familiarity with migration frameworks, assessment tooling, and automation pipelines.

Soft Skills & Delivery

• Ability to perform under pressure during high-risk cutovers.
• Clear communicator who can explain issues to engineering, architecture and leadership teams.
• Excellent documentation skills and disciplined approach to change control.

Additional Desirable Skills :

• Experience with Oracle DB, Veritas, ZFS, Zones/LDOMs.
• Familiarity with hybrid or multi-cloud migrations.
• Experience working within MSP or enterprise environments.

Salary Banding

£450–£600 per day / £65,000–£90,000 perm FTC

Interview Question Bank

• Describe your experience migrating Solaris workloads to cloud environments.
• How have you used Stromasys CHARON in previous migrations?
• Explain your approach to creating runbooks for complex cutovers.