Application Engineer

World Class Defence Organisation based in is currently looking to recruit an Application Engineer subcontractor.
Candidates who have previously held positions such as Application Engineer, Application Support Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Systems Integration Engineer, Middleware Engineer, Disaster Recovery Engineer, PLM Engineer may also have relevant transferable experience and would be of interest.
Rate: £67.57 per hour
Overtime Rate: Hours worked over the standard 37 hours per week, will be paid at ‘time and a quarter'
Location: Bolton or Stevenage or Bristol – depending on your preference
Hybrid / Remote working: The role will be hybrid - onsite 2 days per week
Duration: 12 Months with very likely extension. Contracts are often ongoing and long-term thereafter.
IR35 status: Inside IR35 (Umbrella)
Application Engineer Job Description:
Digital Excellence function providing IT Services to the business.

Responsibilities:
We are seeking a highly technical Application Engineer to ensure the mission-readiness, availability, and survivability of our critical engineering application suites. In this role, you will be the technical anchor for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) at the application layer.
You will not just write policies; you will design, engineer, and automate failover mechanisms, fault isolation patterns, and recovery pipelines. This is a highly collaborative role requiring tight integration with our core Infrastructure, Cyber Security, and Network Engineering teams to co-design full-stack, infrastructure-supported resilience solutions capable of withstanding severe-but-plausible cyber and kinetic disruptions.

Key Responsibilities

• Application BC/DR Engineering: Design, build, and maintain application-layer resilience mechanisms.
• Infrastructure & Network Collaboration: Partner closely with Infrastructure and Network teams to co-design resilient solutions and failover mechanisms.
• Impact Tolerance & Recovery Metrics: Establish, monitor, and continuously validate Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
• Joint Resilience Drills: Participate in end-to-end, multi-team disaster recovery exercises simulating extreme scenarios, including total datacentre loss, supply chain compromises, and air-gap isolations.
• Defence Compliance & Data Sovereignty: Ensure all applications and solutions strictly adhere to defence data regulations, air-gapping requirements, cryptographic mandates, and frameworks.
• Implement/modify access control mechanisms and auditing to meet defined acceptance criteria.

Skillset/experience required:

• Application Layer Knowledge: Proven experience working in environments specializing in engineering software ecosystems (e.g., PTC Windchill, IBM ELM), experience with middleware components.
• Resilient engineering: Proven experience engineering resilient solutions with a focus on business continuity & digital resilience.
• Data & Pipeline Automation: Experience managing data replication across distributed or air-gapped systems.
• Defence Environment Familiarity: Experience working within air-gapped networks, or cross-domain solutions.
• Security Clearance: Must be eligible for, or currently hold, UK Security Clearance (SC)