Lead Platform Engineer

Lead Engineer - Platform Engineering | Melbourne | Permena

Most platform engineering roles let you choose: go deep technically or step into leadership. This one allows for both. You'll manage 3–6 engineers directly; coaching, mentoring, career development, while staying hands-on with the platform infrastructure those engineers are building.

If that balance sounds energising rather than exhausting, keep reading.

The team:

The Platform Engineering team builds platforms and solutions that solve complex information problems and enable innovation across a large, established technology organisation. The team provides shared infrastructure, governance, and reusable assets that empower AI and product teams to experiment safely, ship faster, and deliver at scale. Product Engineers, Data scientists and ML engineers can move fast without breaking things, you've done your job.

What you'll actually spend your time on:

You'll lead delivery of platform systems from development through to production — ensuring high availability, resilience, and performance for production workloads. That means the foundational AWS infrastructure underneath all of it. You'll contribute to the technical strategy for Product, AI and ML platforms in close partnership with Staff Engineers, while ensuring your team can actually execute against it.

You'll build and operate scalable infrastructure on AWS whilst, strengthening engineering practices and DevOps culture across the platform promoting reliability tenants such as incident management, toil reduction and observability as a first class citizen. You understand the imporance of quality documentation, the kind of documentation that means the next person doesn't need to reverse-engineer your decisions.

On the people side, you'll build strong relationships across multiple engineering and product domains. You'll lead recruitment, onboarding, and retention. You'll run a team where psychological safety and high performance aren't competing priorities and you'll represent engineering leadership in rooms where you're the most senior technical voice setting direction, driving alignment, and making decisions stick.

This role will challenge you if you enjoy:

Building platforms that serve multiple engineering domains as customers, understanding that what they need and what engineers typically build are often two different things. Setting direction when the path isn't clear, making sound trade-offs in genuinely ambiguous situations. Leading through credibility and clear thinking rather than positional authority. Operating at the intersection of infrastructure engineering, software engineer and AI/ML, where the workloads are demanding and the pace of change is relentless. Lifting a team's engineering maturity over time not just shipping the next feature, but making the team measurably better at shipping everything after it.

What you'll bring:

Direct line management experience of engineers not just mentoring, but actual people leadership including coaching, career development, and performance. Strong AWS infrastructure experience across compute, storage, networking, and security, with Infrastructure-as-Code practices baked in. Proficiency for platform automation, tooling, and integrations. Experience building and operating highly available, resilient production systems. Demonstrated experience writing well-tested, readable software using secure coding practices, current patterns, and tooling. SRE experience building and operating production platform systems, with a track record of enabling technical teams through platform capabilities rather than gatekeeping them. You've recruited and developed engineers before. And people listen to you because of what you bring to the room, not because of your title.

Why this role:

The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, software and AI infrastructure a space moving faster than almost any other domain in engineering right now. You'll shape team culture, influence platform strategy for Software, GenAI and ML, and build the kind of engineering team that data scientists and ML engineers actively want to work with.

If you're the engineer people pull into the room when the conversation needs both technical depth and the judgement to land it with a team this is your role.

We're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. If your background doesn't tick every box but you recognise yourself in the challenges above, we'd like to hear from you.