Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer

Position : Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer Salary : 2,700 - 3,500 AUD (final offer depends on the qualification) Working Hours & Conditions : AU Business Hours OVERVIEW: We're looking for a highly skilled Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer, the kind who could run a hosting platform single-handed, to help run and strengthen the platform behind a digital agency's client websites and applications. Most client sites are Drupal and Laravel applications running on a Kubernetes-based hosting platform backed by AWS. This is a high-trust, senior role at the centre of how the business delivers for clients. You'll bring the depth and self-sufficiency to own problems end-to-end, working alongside a small platform and development team to keep the entire hosting estate online, secure, and shipping: responding when a site goes down, hardening security and access, running deployment pipelines, and making sure the business can recover from anything. You won't just keep things running. A real, prioritized automation backlog is waiting for someone to drive it forward. We want an engineer who thinks in workflows and treats repetitive manual work as a bug to be fixed: scripting it away, wiring up tooling, and using automation and AI to raise the whole team's leverage over time. If you tinker with this stuff for fun and have personal projects to show for it, we want to hear about them. RESPONSIBILITIES: Platform & infrastructure operations: Help run and maintain the Kubernetes-based hosting environment and AWS infrastructure hosting client Drupal and Laravel applications. , Environment migration & configuration: Help migrate and configure client applications into new Kubernetes environments, standing up, tuning, and validating environments as the estate evolves. Incident response & on-call: Contribute to the response to outages and security incidents: detection, containment, remediation, and reporting. Monitor alerting daily and ensure nothing is left unhandled. Take part in incident fire drills to keep response sharp. CI/CD & deployments: Execute go-lives for new and re-platformed sites, resolve pipeline failures, and improve deployment workflows. Security, access & compliance: Help manage identity and access across Google Workspace, Atlassian, hosting, and version control. Support staff onboarding and secure offboarding, including device management. Contribute to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance work: maintaining controls, evidence, and audit readiness. Operate within segregated-environment boundaries, where access to certain systems is restricted under compliance and client contractual requirements. Monitoring & observability: Maintain, improve, and stand up monitoring and alerting so problems are caught before clients notice. Domains, DNS & SSL: Resolve DNS issues and manage domain and SSL/TLS certificate lifecycles for client and internal domains. Backup & disaster recovery: Run backup restore tests and quarterly DR drills, demonstrating sub-one-hour recovery. Cost & vendor management: Help stay on top of SaaS and infrastructure spend, vendor relationships, and renewals. Automation & workflow: Help drive down the automation backlog, turning manual runbooks into scripted, repeatable workflows and applying AI where it earns its place Essential Solid Linux systems administration and strong scripting/automation skills (e.g. Bash, Python) Strong automation instincts and a genuine grasp of workflow design: you see the repetitive process and reach for a way to automate it Hands-on experience with workflow and automation tooling (e.g. n8n, or similar) Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads (the hosting platform runs on Kubernetes, so this is central) Experience migrating and configuring workloads across Kubernetes environments. Experience with containerized hosting and cloud infrastructure: Docker and AWS Experience running CI/CD pipelines (Bitbucket Pipelines used here) A calm, methodical approach to incident response and production troubleshooting under pressure Sound judgement on security and access control, with a least-privilege mindset Exposure to compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2, and the discipline to maintain controls and evidence Comfortable working within governed access boundaries, where some environments are access-restricted for compliance and contractual reasons The skill and self-sufficiency to run a platform like this largely on your own, while working within a small team and its governance Able to point to concrete examples where you've applied automation or AI in a DevOps context and explain the impact Highly regarded Personal projects, side builds, or a home lab that show you automate for the love of it Practical use of AI tooling in day-to-day operational work Familiarity with Drupal and/or Laravel application hosting Experience with managed Kubernetes hosting platforms Experience with on-call/alerting tooling (e.g. OpsGenie), JAMF, and Atlassian / Google Workspace admin A track record of automating away repetitive operational work Experience contributing to ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audits and certification DNS, SSL/TLS, and domain lifecycle know-how Ideal personality traits We're looking for someone who: ● stays calm and methodical under pressure ● thinks in workflows and treats repetitive manual work as a problem to be solved ● reaches for automation and AI as a first instinct, not an afterthought ● builds and tinkers outside work because they enjoy it ● could run a platform solo, but works well in a small team and within its boundaries ● doesn't cut corners on security ● respects access boundaries and governance without needing to be told twice