AWS DevOps Engineer — Short-Term Contract

[NO AGENCIES - Please do not apply on behalf of an Agency] Summary We're seeking a hands-on AWS DevOps Engineer to support an existing Laravel platform through the final push from Staging to Production go-live. The infrastructure is already built and running on AWS ECS — this is not a greenfield role (although the stack is very new). We need someone who can pick up an established stack quickly, stabilise our deployment process, add proper visibility into it, and harden the environment for production. This is a focused, delivery-oriented engagement of roughly 3–4 weeks, full-time. Important: you must be comfortable working within an existing setup rather than rebuilding it. Important: We are launching in the next 2 weeks so we need someone to hit the ground running We expect 40 hours a week minimum. We're looking for someone who can read an unfamiliar AWS/Laravel environment, understand it fast, and improve it pragmatically. What you'll be working on: Production readiness for go-live — scaling, monitoring, alerting, and verifying backups/restore as we move from Staging to a live Production environment Deployment stability — diagnose and resolve current rolling-deployment instability on ECS, so deployments complete predictably and the new task reliably replaces the old one Deployment observability — implement CloudWatch logging, alarms, and health-check tuning so stalled or failed deployments surface immediately, without manual investigation across the console Configuration reliability — harden CORS and environment-variable injection across the API and frontend services so they're reliable and tested rather than trial-and-error CI/CD transparency — review the existing pipeline so that a green build genuinely reflects a successful AWS deployment Handover — produce concise runbooks and documentation so our in-house team can operate and troubleshoot the environment independently Cost optimisation — identify and action sensible AWS cost reductions where they don't compromise production resilience (e.g. removing transient migration resources, right-sizing) — secondary to go-live stability What we are NOT looking for No re-architecting or over-engineering — the platform works and is close to go-live Kubernetes is out of scope — this runs on ECS and stays on ECS CI/CD should remain simple and pragmatic — lightweight pipelines, not a platform rebuild We want fast diagnosis, clean fixes, and knowledge transfer, not a long-term build programme Ideal experience Strong, hands-on AWS experience — specifically ECS deployments, task definitions, rolling updates, and service health checks Proven experience debugging stuck or failed ECS deployments and CI-to-AWS discrepancies Solid CloudWatch experience — logs, metrics, and alarms for deployment and runtime visibility Comfortable with CORS, Secrets Manager / parameter-based env-var injection, ALB, and VPC networking Laravel deployment experience preferred Able to onboard onto an existing environment quickly and work alongside an in-house team Practical, delivery-focused mindset with clear documentation habits Engagement details Duration: approximately 3–4 weeks Commitment: full-time, 40 hours a week and flexible to work over weekends around the launch. Hours: you'll be expected to log your hours via UpWork and work UK Hours. Working style: remote, collaborating with our existing development team Must be able to speak English as this is the common language of the team. No Agencies, we want a dedicated individual resource.