Infrastructure Lead – Automation and Cloud

Location: Fully remote across Australia and New Zealand. For candidates based in Sydney, there is the option to work from our office, with the team typically getting together in person around one day a week. Employment type: Full-time Salary: Competitive market salary, based on experience and location About Heropa Heropa is a hands-on training and virtual labs platform that helps software companies drive product adoption, validate proficiency, and deliver technical enablement at scale across customers, partners, and internal teams. Our customers use Heropa to provide access to real, fully configured software environments, including complex multi-cloud deployments, and to assess how users interact with those environments. We’re growing, releasing new capabilities regularly, and expanding the scale and complexity of the use cases we support. The role We’re looking for an experienced Infrastructure Lead to take ownership of our cloud infrastructure, automation, and platform operations. This is a senior, hands-on role covering infrastructure engineering, automation, solution design, and complex troubleshooting. You’ll help ensure the Heropa platform continues to scale effectively as our customer base, product capabilities, and technical requirements grow. Heropa primarily operates on AWS, while our platform also provisions and supports environments across other major cloud providers. What you’ll be responsible for Cloud infrastructure — owning the infrastructure that supports the Heropa platform and customer environments, with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, performance, and cost.Infrastructure automation and tooling — managing and evolving how we provision, configure, and deploy infrastructure. Our current tooling includes Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Jenkins, but the role is not limited to maintaining the existing stack.Solution architecture — translating product, business, and customer requirements into practical infrastructure and platform designs, and helping shape how the platform evolves as requirements become more complex.Platform operations and troubleshooting — monitoring infrastructure health and taking ownership of complex issues across cloud services, Linux, networking, containers, automation, and application dependencies.Customer technical support — providing infrastructure expertise for complex customer deployments and technical issues when required. This is not primarily a customer support role, but you should be comfortable working directly with technical customers from time to time.Operational improvement — identifying opportunities to simplify operations, reduce manual work, and improve engineering effectiveness through automation, better tooling, and AI agents. What we’re looking for We’re looking for someone with strong infrastructure fundamentals who can work both at a detailed engineering level and at a broader solution architecture level. You should bring: Deep experience with AWS and cloud infrastructure, including designing, operating, and troubleshooting production environments, with a strong understanding of scalability, security, reliability, performance, and cost management.A solid background in infrastructure automation, including Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, CI/CD, and deployment automation. Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Jenkins is useful, but we care more about sound engineering principles than any particular toolset.Excellent systems fundamentals across Linux, networking, and containers, with the ability to reason across the stack and diagnose issues that span multiple technologies or layers.A strong understanding of cloud architecture and operational best practices, with an active interest in how infrastructure, platform engineering, automation, and cloud technologies are evolving.Solution architecture capability — the ability to understand technical requirements, assess trade-offs, and turn them into practical infrastructure and platform designs.Production troubleshooting experience — the ability to take an unclear or complex technical problem, investigate it methodically, and drive it through to resolution.Good engineering judgment — knowing when to automate, when to simplify, when to improve an existing system, and when a different approach is warranted.Customer-facing confidence — the ability to communicate clearly with technical customers and work with them on complex technical requirements or issues.A high degree of ownership — someone who identifies problems and opportunities, proposes improvements, and follows them through without requiring detailed direction.A practical approach to emerging technology, including using AI agents and automation where they can materially improve engineering output or reduce manual work. Nice to have Relevant AWS or other cloud certifications.Experience working in a product-focused startup or scale-up environment, where priorities move quickly and engineers are expected to take broad ownership.Experience working directly with customers on technical requirements, deployments, or complex support issues.Experience across multiple cloud platforms or infrastructure-heavy SaaS environments. Applying We’re not asking for a generic cover letter. Instead, please answer these two short questions: 1. What’s the most valuable or surprising piece of infrastructure or operational work you’ve handed over to an AI agent? 2. What’s the hardest problem you’ve encountered when using AI agents for engineering or operations, and how did you work around it? Please keep each answer to around 100 words. We’re much more interested in specific experience and strong opinions than polished answers.