Principal Engineer, Platform
Firmus Technologies1 day ago
Sydney, AustraliaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and multi-site management plane of the engineering platform across public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and AI factory sites.
- Define scalable site and deployment architectures, including Kubernetes and hypervisor cluster construction, upgrades, recovery, networking, and release management.
- Build engineer self-service through a shared platform API, CLI, automation, developer portal, service catalogue, templates, and production-readiness scorecards.
- Provide multi-cluster deployment across regions and data centres while isolating customer workloads and maintaining site operation during orchestrator outages.
- Set platform SLOs and error budgets, lead major incident response, and ensure post-mortems result in corrective fixes.
- Establish delivery standards covering code review, acceptance tests, traceability, progressive rollout, rollback, artifact provenance, and application security controls.
- Provide platform services for secrets, certificates, single sign-on, mutual TLS, short-lived credentials, automated rotation, patching, and compliance evidence.
- Embed SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 controls into policy-as-code workflows and detect and correct configuration drift.
- Own platform and cloud cost design and establish shared cost-management paths for teams and sites.
- Mentor engineers, lead design and code reviews, set secure AI-assisted development practices, conduct technical interviews, and shape the platform roadmap with partner teams.
- Represent the platform team in customer and auditor reviews and participate in the on-call rotation with occasional overseas travel.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of platform, infrastructure, or software engineering experience, including at least 3 years at principal level or equivalent.
- Experience setting technical direction delivered by multiple teams while remaining hands-on.
- Experience owning a golden path with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, GitOps, progressive rollout, rollback, artifact signing and provenance, and security gates.
- Experience running a platform as a product with self-service templates and an adopted platform API or CLI measured by adoption and delivery performance.
- Experience building, upgrading, and recovering Kubernetes on self-managed and virtualised infrastructure as well as in public cloud such as AWS across multiple sites.
- Deep practical knowledge of Kubernetes internals, including the API server, etcd, scheduling, networking, storage, and admission control.
- Strong programming ability in Go or Python, including services, controllers, or tools consumed by other teams.
- Experience building platform security capabilities such as secrets management, certificate automation, short-lived credentials, and fleet patching under SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, or equivalent controls.
- Experience running reliability programmes involving SLOs, error budgets, change control, and incident reviews.
- Clear written and verbal English communication for explaining technical problems, decisions, and trade-offs to engineers, executives, and customers.
- Willingness to join the on-call rotation and travel overseas occasionally.
Benefits
- Full-time employment.
- Candidates may be based in Australia or Singapore.
- The role reports to the Senior Manager, Platform Engineering.
About Firmus Technologies
Firmus Technologies builds energy‑efficient AI infrastructure, developing liquid‑cooled “AI Factory” data centers and operating a large‑scale GPU cloud for model training. The company sells capacity and services to developers, enterprises, education, and government customers, with a focus on energy and cost efficiency across Asia‑Pacific. Founded in 2019 in Australia, Firmus is privately held and headquartered in St Leonards, Tasmania.