Bare Metal Platform Engineer

Contract: Bare Metal Platform Engineer & Orchestration Lead

Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 6 months +
Location: Yorkshire
Rate: Negotiable (Deemed inside IR35 via Umbrella solution)
Reference: 20233

Role Summary:

Major IT Consultancy is seeking a Bare Metal Platform Engineer to be responsible for the technical engineering, industrialisation, and operational lifecycle of a clients global x86 estate. Unlike a traditional asset lead, this role focuses on abstracting hardware complexity through automation. You will be responsible for engineering the 'connective tissue' between vendor-specific management tools (iDRAC, iLO, XCC) and the clients core orchestration engines. The goal is to deliver 'Bare Metal as a Service' (BMaaS) by ensuring that Dell, HPE, and Lenovo hardware can be provisioned, managed, and observed as a unified, code-driven resource.

Key Responsibilities:

• Unified Orchestration Engineering: Design and implement automation workflows that abstract vendor-specific tools (Lenovo XClarity, Dell OpenManage, HPE OneView) into a standardized management layer.
• Northbound Integration: Lead the integration of hardware management platforms with the Bank's Ansible and Terraform playbooks to enable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provisioning.
• Observability & Telemetry: Engineer the export of hardware health and performance metrics into OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and Prometheus to ensure unified monitoring across the heterogeneous fleet.
• ITSM & DDI Automation: Automate the end-to-end lifecycle from IP allocation (DDI/IPAM) to ServiceNow ticket generation for automated hardware break-fix and warranty tracking.
• Firmware & Security Compliance: Define and programmatically enforce 'Golden Baselines' for BIOS, RAID, and NIC settings, ensuring all assets meet the Bank's security control frameworks before being promoted to production.
• Audit & Evidence Engineering: Maintain immutable, automated audit trails for every hardware configuration change, replacing manual asset records with real-time 'state of the world' reporting.

Key Skills & Experience:

• Multi-Vendor Hardware Deep-Dive: Expert-level knowledge of Dell PowerEdge (iDRAC), HPE ProLiant (iLO), and Lenovo ThinkSystem (XCC) hardware architectures.
• Protocol Mastery: Proficiency in hardware-level communication protocols, specifically Redfish API, IPMI, and SNMP for out-of-band management.
• Infrastructure as Code: Significant experience with Ansible (Roles/Collections) or Terraform for automating physical infrastructure deployments.
• DDI & Network Services: Working knowledge of DHCP, DNS, and IPAM (DDI) services and how they interact with PXE/iPXE boot sequences.
• Scripting & Development: Strong Python or Bash skills for building custom integration wrappers and data transformation tools.
• Operational Governance: Experience working in highly regulated or audit-driven environments, with a focus on automated evidence collection.

Networking People (UK) is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.

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