Platform Engineer

Senior Platform / Systems Engineer Up to $190k + Super + Bonus Melbourne | Hybrid The platform works today. The bigger question is what needs to change for it to work at 10x the scale. You’d be joining as a critical hire for a growing AI business whose platform already sits behind high-stakes financial decisions. You'll come in with a broad remit across architecture, AWS infrastructure, distributed systems, reliability, performance, observability and automation. But there's already a very real first problem waiting for you. Observability. As the platform has grown, so has the complexity underneath it. More services, more dependencies, more signals and inevitably more noise. They want to get much better at understanding what's actually happening inside the system. Which signals matter? Where is something starting to degrade? How do you follow a problem across distributed services? Why did one underlying issue generate 20 alerts? What should wake somebody up at 2am and what shouldn't? That's likely to be one of the first things you'll get your hands around. But it's not where the role stops. Because better visibility into the system starts to expose bigger engineering questions. Where are the bottlenecks?What happens when traffic doubles? Or grows 10x?Which parts of the architecture will become a problem?Where are the hidden dependencies and failure modes?What should we change now, and what can genuinely wait? That's the broader role. So what could the first few months actually look like? Early on, you're getting underneath the existing production environment. Understanding the architecture, following requests through the system and working out how engineers currently know when something isn't behaving as expected. You'll probably find noise. Gaps in instrumentation. Things that are difficult to trace. Operational work that should be automated. You'll improve them. But while doing that, you'll also develop a much deeper understanding of how the platform behaves across its dependencies, bottlenecks, failure modes and scaling characteristics. And that's where the role starts getting bigger. You might change how a service scales. Rework part of an event-driven workflow. Automate a recurring failure mode. Improve performance somewhere critical. Question an architectural decision that made sense at the company's previous stage but won't at the next one. And then you'll actually build the changes you recommend. This is a senior hands-on engineering role with enough ownership to influence how the platform evolves from here. You'll work across things like: AWS and cloud infrastructureDistributed and event-driven systemsSoftware and systems architectureReliability and resiliencePerformance and scalabilityObservability, tracing and instrumentationInfrastructure as code and automationProduction incidents and failure modes You don't need to be an expert in every one of those and you don't necessarily need to come from an SRE background. You might currently be a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Platform Engineer, Systems Engineer or SRE. What matters is that you've spent enough time around complex production systems to understand how software, infrastructure and architecture interact, and you're still comfortable getting your hands dirty. The opportunity is to join while the platform is established enough to have interesting scaling problems, but early enough that one engineer can still have a disproportionate influence over how they're solved. Your first problem might be observability. Your longer-term problem is helping make sure the platform they're running today is the right platform for where the business is going next. This is a role that will be scoped around the right person. Ignore the title and the scope of the role - if you want to build the systems to help scale and are equally excited about the what that looks like as well as actually building it, apply here or drop me, Jon Holland, a message on LinkedIn.