Senior Engineer, Platform Engineering

Optus Network Engineering keeps Australia connected. We own the design, planning, delivery, and operation of one of Australia's largest and most critical telecommunications networks, keeping 11 million customers online every day. We support the IP infrastructure that powers mobile, broadband, and digital services across the nation, and we're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to lead the platform engineering effort within our team.

The IP Automation & Tooling team develops and operates automation, observability, and data platforms spanning IP Core, Edge, Aggregation, and Optical domains. We own the end-to-end roadmap for transforming our IP network into an intelligent, self-healing platform. Part of that platform runs on physical infrastructure in Optus data centres. We are building an on-premises private cloud to run containerised workloads at scale, and evolving it into a multi-tenant shared service across the business. The team builds and operates this together. This role leads the platform engineering effort within it.

You will be joining a team of software engineers, network engineers, and data scientists who work alongside you. The platform is in active development, and you will lead the work of establishing the tenancy model, capacity framework, hardware lifecycle standards, and operational practices the team's workloads depend on. Platform reliability is a shared team outcome, and this role is the specialist driving it.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and operation of a production-grade container and virtualisation platform on bare metal, covering cluster lifecycle, node management, upgrade cycles, and VM workloads via OpenShift Virtualization.
• Contribute automation in Go or Python to manage platform operations, build internal tooling, and reduce manual toil for the team.
• Establish GitOps and infrastructure-as-code practices for all platform configuration, ensuring every change is version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and auditable across the team.
• Drive the physical infrastructure layer in coordination with data centre and facilities teams: server provisioning via out-of-band management, firmware lifecycle, storage hardware configuration, and NIC configuration.
• Define and implement multi-tenant isolation in collaboration with software engineering and security teams: workload separation, resource quotas, access controls, and policy-as-code guardrails across shared infrastructure.
• Build the platform observability stack with the team: metrics, alerting, SLO definitions, dashboards, and runbooks in place before incidents happen.
• Lead platform-layer incident response, conduct structured post-incident reviews, and drive systemic fixes via the operations teams.
• Develop capacity planning models covering compute, storage, memory, and network, with the multi-tenancy roadmap and workload growth in view.
• Evaluate emerging platform technologies, including hybrid cloud integration patterns with AWS and GCP, and make pragmatic recommendations on what solves the team's actual problems.
• Define platform standards, onboarding guides, and self-service patterns with the team so engineering squads can operate independently without creating support bottlenecks.

What You Bring

• Tertiary qualifications in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with 5+ years owning production infrastructure or platform systems end to end in large, complex environments.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes or equivalent) in on-premises or data centre environments. Purely managed cloud experience is not sufficient for this role.
• Engineering capability in Go or Python, with a track record of delivering automation tooling or operational software, not just configuration files.
• GitOps and infrastructure-as-code fluency: version-controlled, peer-reviewed, auditable platform changes at production scale.
• Virtualisation experience running VMs and containers on shared physical infrastructure, demonstrated depth with physical server infrastructure: bare metal provisioning, firmware lifecycle, storage hardware, and hardware fault diagnosis.
• Observability depth beyond tool installation: defined SLOs, authored runbooks, and led post-incident reviews with measurable outcomes.
• Familiarity with public cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), including managed Kubernetes, VPC, IAM, or hybrid cloud networking. Experience applying cloud-native patterns in an on-premises context is an advantage.
• Strong communication skills; able to work across software engineering, network engineering, security, and facilities teams.
• Comfortable in greenfield environments with high ambiguity, and able to turn infrastructure problems into automatable, repeatable solutions.
• Experience migrating virtualised workloads from VMware or similar hypervisors to a container-native platform is desirable.
• Background in telco, carrier, or ISP environments, including familiarity with Cisco, Nokia, Juniper network equipment, is highly valued.
• Experience with SR-IOV, DPDK, or hardware offload for performance-sensitive networking workloads is a plus.

What’s in it for you?

• Competitive remuneration and employee discounts. Make life easier (and more affordable) with $80 monthly credit and 25% off Optus products and unique shopping discounts with our retail partners.
• Flexible working arrangements with opportunities to work three days in the office, two days remote or home.
• Vibrant and collaborative office campus that includes cafes, convenience store, chill out zones, GP, post office, gym and on-site childcare centre.
• Competitive leave policies, including additional 'Connected’ days to focus on culture, family, health, community, or whatever’s important to you.
• We support growing families with inclusive, carer-neutral paid Parental Leave of up to 16 weeks.
• Direct your own development and build future-ready skills with Optus U’s industry-focused micro-credentials, developed with La Trobe and Macquarie Universities.
• Build meaningful connections through employee-led networks and diversity initiatives including Culture Connect, Elevate Women, Disability Network and Express Yourself (LGBTQIA+).
• Put your wellbeing first with free access to counselling and support services, 24/7 — in-person, by phone, SMS, or video.

At Optus, we are strengthened by others and that means valuing diversity and saying ‘yes’ to embracing individual differences. We are committed to ensuring that our application process provides an equal employment opportunity to all job seekers, including individuals from diverse gender, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, individuals with a disability, individuals identifying as being part of the LGBTQIA+ community, individuals who may have served in the armed forces or who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. We also want to do our best to make our recruitment process inclusive. If you require any adjustments or accessibility support to participate fairly and equitably in the recruitment process, please email AccessibleRecruitment@optus.com.au or call 1800 309 170. We're here to help. When you contact us, please advise your preferred method of contact and we will be in touch within 48 hours.

For more information on Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Optus, please visit https://www.optus.com.au/about/inclusion-diversity

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