Lead Cloud Platform Engineer

Compare Club; Sydney; On-site; AUD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Compare Club is seeking a deeply hands-on Lead Cloud Platform Engineer to lead the DevOps team and drive engineering of our cloud platform. This is a technical leadership role with 70% hands-on work and 30% mentorship of two DevOps engineers in Vietnam.

You’ll modernise the AWS estate, move to GitHub Actions and GitOps, and strengthen security and cost discipline while delivering platform roadmaps and reliable operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in infrastructure, DevOps or platform engineering.
• Production AWS experience including ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, WAF, Route 53, IAM Identity Center, SSM and Secrets Manager.
• Comfortable in a terminal and design reviews; not seeking full-time management.
• Experience delivering in a production AWS environment with complex workloads.

Responsibilities

• Own the team’s engineering standards and platform roadmap; be the first escalation point for cloud platform matters.
• Design out manual effort with Python, Bash and agentic automation; support AI workloads on AWS Bedrock and SageMaker.
• Complete move to GitHub Actions and GitOps; migrate Elastic Beanstalk estate to Terraform.
• Define SLOs; improve observability; lead major incident response; establish after-hours on‑call rotation.
• Maintain ISO 27001 and PCI DSS controls; strengthen secrets, access and edge protection.
• Build cost visibility; deliver savings across the platform, including AI/ML workloads.
• Lead and mentor two DevOps engineers; share ownership of every production domain.

Skills

ECS (EC2 & Fargate)

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Python

Bash

Security & Compliance

AI in Operations

Tools

Checkov

New Relic

CloudWatch

S3

Job description

About Compare Club

Compare Club provides comparison services across a broad range of household expense categories aimed at making it easier for consumers to make the right purchasing decisions, providing them more value and peace of mind. We have over 500 employees across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and around the world. Everything we do is aimed at helping customers save money on household bills.

About the Role

We are seeking a deeply hands‑on Lead Cloud Platform Engineer to lead our DevOps team and drive the day‑to‑day engineering of Compare Club’s cloud platform. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role rather than a management role: you will spend around seventy per cent of your time building, automating and engineering, and the remainder leading and developing two experienced DevOps engineers based in Vietnam.

You will join a platform mid‑transformation. Our AWS estate spans a modern, Terraform‑managed ECS and Fargate environment alongside an Elastic Beanstalk estate that is being modernised, with delivery moving from AWS CodePipeline to GitHub Actions and GitOps. All of this operates under live ISO 27001:2022 and PCI DSS v4.0.1 certification, with Essential Eight, APRA CPS 234 and Australian Privacy Principles obligations on top.

You will own the engineering standards and the delivery of the platform roadmap, finish the modernisation, strengthen our security and resilience posture, and establish genuine cost and operational discipline. You will report to the Senior Manager – DevOps and Quality Engineering, who leads cloud infrastructure, DevOps and observability alongside Quality Engineering as a separate team. Larger architectural decisions go to our Architecture Review Board.

Automation is central to how we expect this role to work. We want manual operational effort designed out rather than absorbed, and we are actively investing in AI across the business — so we are looking for someone who will bring AI and agentic automation into how the platform is operated, not only into what it hosts.

A core early expectation is that you become a credible operator across both build and run, so that ownership of every part of our platform is shared across the team.

This role suits an experienced senior engineer ready to step up into leading a team, or an established lead who wants to stay close to the technology rather than move further into management.

Key accountabilities

• Technical Leadership and Engineering Standards: Own the team’s engineering standards and the platform roadmap, and be the first escalation point for cloud platform matters.
• AI and Automation: Design out manual effort through Python, Bash and agentic automation, and own the foundations for our AI workloads on AWS Bedrock and SageMaker.
• Platform Modernisation and Delivery Engineering: Complete the move to GitHub Actions and GitOps, and bring our remaining Elastic Beanstalk estate under Terraform.
• Reliability, Observality and Incident Response: Define SLOs, improve observability and alerting, lead major incident response and establish an after-hours on‑call rotation.
• Security, Compliance and Resilience: Maintain the engineering controls behind our ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications, and strengthen secrets, access and edge protection.
• Cloud Cost Stewardship: Build cost visibility and ownership across the platform, and deliver savings, including on AI and ML workloads.
• Leadership of the DevOps Team: Lead and mentor two DevOps engineers in Vietnam, and share ownership of every production domain across the team.

What You Bring

You are a senior, deeply hands‑on cloud engineer with typically eight or more years in infrastructure, DevOps or platform engineering, including recent delivery in a production AWS environment of real complexity. You are just as comfortable in a terminal as in a design review, and you want to keep building rather than move into full‑time management.

• Amazon Web Services: Deep, current, production experience across compute, networking, data and edge services. Our estate is built on ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, WAF, Route 53, IAM Identity Center, SSM and Secrets Manager. We do not run Kubernetes; strong ECS experience is what matters here, although Kubernetes depth transfers well.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform at shared‑module‑library scale, including versioned modules, remote state, drift management and infrastructure‑as‑code security scanning such as Checkov. Experience bringing an existing estate under infrastructure‑as‑code control is highly valued.
• Delivery Engineering: Strong command of Git and GitHub Actions, reusable workflows, OIDC federation, GitOps deployment patterns, and blue/green release strategies. Experience modernising CI/CD tooling without disrupting delivery.
• Observability and Operations: Practical skills with APM and monitoring tooling such as New Relic and CloudWatch, defining service level objectives, structured logging, and improving alert quality. Confident on Linux, reading logs and tracing faults into application code.
• Security and Regulated Environments: Hands‑on DevSecOps practice and prior experience operating under a formal compliance regime such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, APRA CPS 234 or Essential Eight. You treat security as engineering work, not paperwork.
• Automation and Scripting: Strong Python and Bash, plus enough SQL to investigate a data question without waiting on someone else. You instinctively look for the repetitive task that should not be done by a person twice.
• AI Applied to Operations: Genuine interest and ideally practical experience in using AI to run platforms better, whether that is AI‑assisted incident triage, automated remediation, or agentic workflow automation. Experience supporting AI and machine learning workloads in production, for example on AWS Bedrock or SageMaker, is highly valued.
• Valued but not essential: AWS certification such as Solutions Architect Associate or Professional, or DevOps Engineer Professional; cloud financial management and FinOps practice; Google Cloud and Apigee X; exposure to Snowflake and modern data tooling; experience in a regulated Australian industry.

Beyond the technology, you lead through credibility. You have led or technically mentored engineers before and are ready to own priorities, growth and performance conversations for a small distributed team across time zones. You write documentation people actually use, and you can hold a straight conversation about cost, risk and sequencing with senior stakeholders. You are pragmatic about legacy, systematic about risk, and you finish things. You will thrive here if you enjoy owning a platform end to end in a fast‑moving business, and if inheriting real technical debt reads to you as opportunity rather than warning.

Why Join Us?

• Real Ownership: Design authority here is real and written into the role — you set the standards and you sign off the architecture.
• Tech‑Forward Stack: Work with modern AWS services, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and cutting‑edge AI platform foundations.
• Great Culture: Work alongside high‑performing, collaborative teams in a fast‑growing financial services environment.

Ready to lead our cloud platform into its next era?

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