PHPMailer - Mails not using ses server(No support from aws) - php

Question

I have an ec2 server subscription and I am trying to use SES to send emails using PHPMailer. For some reason, Mails are not being sent from SES server. Mails go from some other server. I spoke with an AWS support member and he confirmed that all the code i have is correct and he cant provide any help with my php code.
His reply was
Thank you for your time speaking today.
As discussed, your a PHP Mailer is not relaying on SES, despite your configuration seems to be correct, it's not triggering SES SMTP Servers.
The line below shows that your message was sent from the EC2 directly, without pass through SES.
Received: from ip-xxxxx.ap-southeast-1.compute.internal (ec2-yyyyyy.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com. [yyyyyyy])
The sample PHPMailer code i have is
<?php
require 'vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->SMTPDebug = 3; // Enable verbose debug output
//$mail->isSMTP(); // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'; // Specify main and backup SMTP servers
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = 'smtp-username'; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = 'smtp-password'; // SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls'; // Enable TLS encryption, `ssl` also accepted
$mail->Port = 587; // TCP port to connect to
$mail->setFrom('contact#example.com', 'John Doer');
$mail->addAddress('abc#gmail.com', 'Random'); // Add a recipient
$mail->addAddress('xyz#gmail.com'); // Name is optional
$mail->isHTML(true); // Set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
$mail->Body = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';
if(!$mail->send()) {
echo 'Message could not be sent.';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo 'Message has been sent';
}
Any help is appreciated.