About the job
Senior / Principal Platform & Infrastructure Engineer
Up to $250k + Super + Bonus + Equity
Sydney | Hybrid
Most infrastructure engineers spend their careers getting further away from the hardware.
This role goes in the other direction.
You’d be joining a deep-tech company building a new computing architecture from the physical hardware upwards.
You’ll work across AWS and cloud infrastructure, on-prem compute, GPU clusters, physical servers, networking, storage and upwards through Linux, Kubernetes, automation, observability, and the platform used by the scientists and engineers building the underlying technology.
In most infrastructure roles like platform engineer, you tend to work on one side or the other.
They’re building a new platform/infrastructure team to take them to commercialisation.
So What Are You Walking Into as the Platform Engineer?
The company has spent years in R&D. As that’s moved towards real commercial use, the infrastructure around it has become increasingly important.
There are cloud environments. On-prem compute clusters. GPU and other accelerated workloads. Labs generating unusual requirements. Scientists who need infrastructure that enables experimentation rather than getting in the way of it.
The challenge is turning all of that into infrastructure that’s reliable, repeatable, and scalable without losing the flexibility a research environment needs, and that’s where the platform engineers come in.
Depending On Your Background, You Might Be Thinking About Things like:
- How should we build and operate our own compute clusters?
- What belongs in AWS and what should run on infrastructure we own?
- How should Kubernetes work when you also own the hardware underneath it?
- Where are the bottlenecks between compute, network, and storage?
- How do we make deploying new physical infrastructure repeatable?
- How do we give researchers flexibility without creating an operational nightmare?
- What should we automate now that previously made sense to do manually?
- How do we build reliability around systems that weren’t originally designed like conventional production infrastructure?
- What does this environment need to look like in three years, not just today?
And then you’ll actually build it.
That might mean Terraform or Ansible one day, Linux or Kubernetes the next, working in AWS, debugging a network or storage problem, or getting much closer to the physical infrastructure than you would in most modern platform teams.
You don’t need to be the Platform Engineer who knows their entire stack from day one. In fact, some of the most interesting people I’ve spoken to for this don’t.
- You might come from Platform Engineering, SRE, HPC, Systems Engineering, Infrastructure, networking, or large-scale compute.
- You might be a cloud/platform engineer who’s spent the last few years in AWS but wants to get closer to the infrastructure underneath it.
- You might have started your career working with physical infrastructure before moving into cloud and Kubernetes.
- You might work in HPC or scientific computing today.
Or you might be the person with a rack of servers at home because you wanted to understand what was actually happening underneath Kubernetes – That curiosity matters here.
How Everyday Will Look
This is a research environment. Some of the problems don’t have established playbooks. Some will take experimentation to solve. And as a platform engineer, you’re working alongside scientists and engineers who are building technology that doesn’t really have an equivalent elsewhere.
The Platform Engineer Opportunity
So they’re not looking for someone who just knows the current set of fashionable infrastructure tools; they’re looking for people who understand systems deeply enough to figure out things they haven’t seen before.
There are a couple of different hires being made, so the role can flex around the person.
- At the Senior end, that could mean coming in as a deeply hands-on engineer and taking ownership of significant parts of the environment.
- At the Principal / Technical Lead end, it gets broader with helping determine how the platform and compute environment should evolve, making architectural decisions and raising the capability of the engineers around you while still being able to get into the detail yourself.
The opportunity is to work across the whole infrastructure stack from cloud services all the way down to physical compute. As a platform engineer, you can get closer to the hardware than most modern infrastructure roles allow, while working with the people actually building the technology that runs on top of it.
Up to $250k + Super + Bonus + Equity depending on level.
This platform engineer role is Sydney-based and hybrid. The onsite element matters because there are actual labs, hardware, and physical infrastructure involved. If you’ve spent your career wanting to understand what’s happening one layer further down, this will probably make sense to you.
Interested in This Role?
Reach out to jon@salientgroup.com.au
