Senior Platform Engineer

At Pet Circle, we believe pets deserve the very best, and the people who love them deserve a better way to care for them. Since 2011, we've grown from that single idea into Australia's biggest online pet retailer, with around 500 Pet Circlers across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, reshaping how pet parents discover, choose and receive what their pets need.

Pet care is a $15 billion industry in Australia, and as pet ownership continues to grow, so do the expectations of modern pet parents. They want expert advice, personalised experiences, convenience and reliability, all delivered seamlessly. That's where we come in. We're building the future of pet care through technology, innovation and a deep understanding of what pets and their people need. It's a big opportunity, and we're only just scratching the surface.

The role

As a Platform Engineer, you'll build the cloud infrastructure, tooling and CI/CD pipelines that Pet Circle's engineering squads ship on, so they can deliver at speed on a platform they can trust. This is a building role, not a run-and-maintain one: lead the future design of production infrastructure for scale on Google Cloud Platform, automate the daily administrative tasks that enable our rapid growth , and own your area broadly.

You’ll report to the Director of Technical Operations while partnering closely with the engineering squads, Staff Engineers and Tech Leads who build the product.

What You’ll Be Working On

• Lead the oversight, future design, and deployment of production cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), optimising for scale, reliability, and availability.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code with Terraform (Pulumi is transferable), focusing on building reproducible, auditable, and automated server infrastructure.
• Help Build, maintain and speed up the CI/CD pipelines the engineering squads rely on to ship safely at pace.
• Containerise and run services with Docker to support modern application management.
• Embed a "shift left" security philosophy throughout the development lifecycle. Strengthen Pet Circle's perimeter by managing Web Application Firewalls (WAF) to protect against malicious traffic, and harden the "front door" of our services using robust API Gateway management, rate limiting, and secure authentication protocols.
• Enhance vulnerability remediation, identity and access management (Google Identity Platform, JumpCloud, or similar), and establish rigorously tested recovery objectives.
• Own observability, performance tuning, monitoring, alerting and logging, so platform or system issues are understood before they reach customers.
• Embed with the engineering squads, understand their friction points, and build a platform roadmap that makes shipping easier.
• Identify high-risk legacy components and plan their removal
• Support cloud cost efficiency, right-sizing and optimising GCP spend.
• Respond to complex production incidents, perform deep root cause analysis in conjunction with engineering teams, and implement long-term fixes, so the same problem doesn't happen twice

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in systems/software engineering with a strong focus on SRE and DevOps paradigms.
• Deep, hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience, this is a must
• Strong proficiency with Cloudflare, it's used heavily here, WAF configurations, and API Gateway management.
• You treat developer tools like a product, focusing on reducing friction and cognitive load for your internal "customers" (the developers).
• You're already using AI in how you work and keen to do more, whether that's writing infrastructure code, debugging pipelines, analysing logs or generating runbooks.
• Proven experience with Terraform in production environments, including complex state management.
• Experience designing pipelines real teams deploy through, utilising tools like GitHub Actions (GitLab is transferable).
• Hands-on with Docker (Kubernetes is fine but not required, we don't lean on it) and a solid background in Linux. Knowledge of Python is preferred.
• You've built and improved security and disaster recovery, not just run tools, and least-privilege thinking comes naturally (JumpCloud and CrowdStrike experience is a plus)
• An experienced engineer who's energised by building the platform, comfortable owning a broad scope in a lean team, and highly adaptable as the organisation grows and technology evolves.
• You communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and partner well across teams

Where you'll work

This is a Sydney-based role. Our office sits on top of Wynyard station, it's pet-friendly (of course), and we work flexibly, a mix of office and home. We believe spending time together in person is important for building strong relationships, collaborating effectively, moving quickly as a team, and having fun!

A few good things

• Heaps of development opportunities - lunch & learns, secondments & unlimited learning courses via Go1
• Flexible working environment
• Up to 50% employee discount
• Product sample giveaways
• Pawrental leave and wellbeing leave
• Volunteer days for the causes you care about
• Fitness corporate partnership

Why you'll want in

Looking after pets, and the pet parents who love them, is what gets us out of bed. That energy carries into how we work, and into what your days here would feel like.

You'll own your patch and have the room to act on it. We move fast and decide fast, and we'd rather test an idea and learn from it than sit on it. You'll have rich, real-time data at your fingertips to back your thinking, and the freedom to chase an opportunity the moment you spot one. The best idea wins, wherever it comes from.

What Holds It Together Is What We Stand For

• We're better together
• We operate with humble hearts and hungry minds
• Pets matter, so pets and pet parents always have a seat at our table
• We're instinctively curious. Always

Everyone (& their pets) Welcome

We're better when we don't all think the same. Different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences make our work sharper and our days more interesting, so whoever you are, if this role excites you we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't tick every box. And if you need anything adjusted in the process to do your best, just say the word, we're happy to help.

Our story, like many good ones, starts with a human and their dog. Our founder, Mike noticed his Dad struggling to lug heavy bags of dog food home from the pet store. And so, in 2011, Pet Circle was born in Sydney with a simple mission: to make caring for pets as easy as possible.

And we've come a long way. Today, we're the #1 player in the Aussie online pet industry and one of Australia's top 5 eCommerce businesses.