Engineering Lead (Developer Platform & AI-enabled SDLC)

Virgin Australia; City of Brisbane; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discounted flights for you and your L1

Hybrid work style

Travel insurance discounts

Wellbeing app access

Dress for Your Day

Job summary

Virgin Australia is building a new Platform Engineering capability to deliver a secure, self-service internal developer platform. You will lead a hands-on, player-coach team blending software delivery, technical leadership and product thinking to improve developer experiences across the enterprise.

Reporting to the Engineering Manager, the role focuses on growing the team, defining the platform roadmap, and delivering reusable templates and golden paths with secure defaults.

Qualifications

• Experience leading internal developer platforms or developer-experience capability.
• Strong software engineering background with hands-on leadership.
• Experience treating internal platform as a product with user discovery.
• Ability to influence across Engineering, Product, Security, Architecture, Risk and Operations.
• Coaching engineers to build sustainable teams.
• Incremental delivery mindset with evidence-based decisions.

Responsibilities

• Grow the platform engineering team and operating model.
• Contribute to platform vision and roadmap.
• Deliver a minimum viable platform iteratively.
• Create reusable templates and components for engineering teams.
• Design APIs, automation, and developer workflows.
• Embed testing, accessibility, observability, security into delivery.
• Set service-level objectives and measure impact.
• Hire, coach and develop engineers and foster inclusive culture.

Skills

Internal developer platform leadership

Platform as a product mindset

Hands-on software engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Coaching engineers

Tools

Node.js tooling

GitLab CI/CD

Terraform

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Engineering Lead – Developer Platform & AI-enabled SDLC

We’re the airline that dares to be different, bold, down-to-earth and built around giving our guests real choice. Safety is our backbone, service is our heartbeat, and our people are our superpower.

We’re vibrant, authentic and unapologetically human. Here, you can bring your whole self, your Virgin Flair and your ambition to a team that champions individuality, innovation and a whole lot of heart. If you’re excited by meaningful work, real opportunities to grow and a culture where you can genuinely make a difference, you’ll feel right at home with us.

Our ambition is to build the airline people love, and technology is central to making that happen. We’re building a new Platform Engineering capability that will make software delivery simpler, faster and more secure across the enterprise. If you’re passionate about cloud platforms, engineering excellence and enabling other engineers to do their best work, we’d love to hear from you.

What you’ll be doing…

As Engineering Lead – Developer Platform & AI-enabled SDLC, you’ll work closely with the Engineering Manager to help establish and grow the team responsible for Virgin Australia’s internal developer platform and golden paths. You’ll treat the platform as a product, with our engineers as its customers, creating secure, reliable and self-service capabilities that make the preferred way of delivering software the easiest way.

This is a highly hands-on player-coach role combining software delivery, technical leadership and product thinking. Around 70% of your time will be spent on the tools—designing, building, testing, reviewing and improving production code, reusable templates and platform capabilities. You’ll also coach engineers and work across Engineering, Product, Security, Architecture, Risk and Operations to reduce developer cognitive load and improve the speed, safety and reliability of software delivery.

This role will report to the Manager, Engineering.

• Help grow the platform engineering team, its operating model, engineering practices and ownership boundaries.
• Contribute to the platform vision and roadmap using developer research, workflow data and continuous feedback.
• Deliver a minimum viable platform incrementally, beginning with the developer journeys where improved self-service will create the greatest value.
• Deliver and maintain reusable application templates, reference implementations and shared components that give engineering teams a production-ready starting point.
• Design composable platform capabilities exposed through clear APIs, automation, templates, documentation and developer-facing workflows.
• Create golden paths with secure defaults, actionable feedback and appropriate escape hatches—enabling teams without unnecessarily constraining them.
• Embed automated testing, accessibility, observability, resilience, policy as code and software supply chain controls into templates and delivery workflows.
• Establish service-level objectives for the platform and measure its impact through adoption, developer experience, delivery performance, reliability, security and cost outcomes.
• Create contribution and extension models that allow engineering teams to help evolve the platform without making the central team a bottleneck.
• Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted engineering capabilities through controlled experiments, measurable outcomes and appropriate security, privacy, intellectual property and human-review safeguards.
• Hire, coach and develop engineers while building an inclusive culture of ownership, learning and continuous improvement.

You’ll be great in this role if you have…

• Experience leading the design or evolution of an internal developer platform, developer-experience capability or reusable engineering platform.
• A strong software engineering background and the ability to provide credible, hands-on technical leadership.
• Experience treating an internal platform as a product—conducting user discovery, prioritising developer journeys and measuring adoption and outcomes.
• Experience designing secure, self-service capabilities that reduce manual hand-offs while maintaining appropriate organisational controls.
• The ability to influence across Engineering, Product, Security, Architecture, Risk and Operations.
• Experience coaching engineers and helping to create effective, sustainable engineering teams.
• A pragmatic mindset: you favour incremental delivery, evidence and feedback over large, technology-led transformation programs.

Essential technical skills

• Strong knowledge of modern frontend architecture, component design and reusable application patterns.
• Experience with Node.js development tooling and package management.
• Experience creating and maintaining application templates, shared libraries or reference implementations used by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong knowledge of automated testing, including unit, component, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Experience integrating web applications with APIs, authentication services and enterprise systems.
• Experience with Git-based development, code review and automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical knowledge of cloud-native application delivery, containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience embedding security, accessibility, observability and operational requirements into production applications and delivery workflows.
• Strong knowledge of software engineering practices, including maintainable design, automated quality controls and secure software delivery.

Additional skills and experience that would be valuable

• Working knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, sufficient to contribute to cross-stack templates and technical decisions.
• Experience with AWS and Amazon EKS.
• Experience with GitLab, including GitLab CI/CD and reusable pipeline components.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogues.
• Experience with software supply chain security, FinOps or Site Reliability Engineering practices.
• Experience introducing AI-assisted engineering tools into enterprise software-delivery workflows.
• Experience in a regulated, high-availability or safety-critical environment.

We’re committed to looking after you, with some of the best benefits and conditions in the industry—including, but not limited to:

• Discounted flights for you and your loved ones, including $1,000 worth of travel credits per year.
• A flexible, hybrid work style. Work from home or the office and adapt your location to suit your style and needs.
• Discounts on travel insurance, lounge membership, car hire, accommodation and experiences worldwide.
• Retail, technology, wellness and lifestyle discounts.
• Free counselling and access to a wellbeing app to support your physical, mental, social and financial health.
• ‘Dress for Your Day’—enjoy the freedom to wear whatever makes you feel great for the type of work you do and the day you have ahead of you.

When everyone is included, everyone wins…

We’re all individuals. And we love that. That’s why we encourage applications from Indigenous Australians, people with disability, those from diverse cultural backgrounds, our friends in the LGBTQIA+ community and anyone else who wants to join our family.