Platform Engineer (NGPO Strategy – Ecosystems Development)

[What the role is] The Next Generation Programme Office (NGPO) Strategy branch is looking for motivated platform engineers with a collaborative, proactive attitude and a passion for continuous learning. You will be part of a team focused on designing, implementing, and maintaining either cloud infrastructure and platform services OR on-premises infrastructure and platform services for the Next Generation ANS (Air Navigation System), depending on the specific deployment requirements. If you are an adaptable, proactive platform engineer with a passion for best practices and continuous learning, we would love to hear from you. Join us and contribute to building robust, scalable infrastructure solutions for the future! [What you will be working on] Key responsibilities include: Design & Maintain Mission-Critical Infrastructure: Architect, implement, and maintain platform solutions for safety-critical applications, ensuring compliance with industry standards for reliability, availability, and performance in either cloud or on-premises environments.

Responsibilities

• Work with either cloud-native technologies and services (AWS, Azure) including compute, storage, networking, and managed services, OR on-premises infrastructure including virtualisation platforms, bare metal servers, and traditional networking solutions, adapting quickly to new technologies as needed.
• Implement infrastructure automation using Infrastructure as Code tools and configuration management systems to ensure consistent, repeatable deployments in your designated environment.
• Design and manage containerised environments using container orchestration platforms and related ecosystem tools to support application deployment and scaling.
• Work closely with software developers, architects, and other stakeholders to design, implement and deploy scalable platform solutions.
• May also perform Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions as part of the role responsibilities.
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions to ensure platform health, performance, and early issue detection across all environments.
• Apply security best practices, implement security controls, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements for aviation systems in your designated platform environment.
• Maintain and optimise data pipeline infrastructure, streaming platforms, and analytics workloads as secondary responsibility.
• Perform platform deployment, integration testing, and validation in production environments, ensuring seamless service delivery.
• Proactively identify and resolve infrastructure, performance, and reliability issues across development and production environments.

Requirements

• Maintain thorough documentation for infrastructure, processes, and operational procedures, ensuring knowledge transfer and compliance requirements are met. [What we are looking for] Trained in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent.
• Platform engineering and infrastructure management experience in either cloud or on-premises environments.
• Strong knowledge of either cloud-native architectures and microservices patterns OR traditional infrastructure patterns and distributed systems design.
• Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) Container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, OpenShift) Package management and deployment tools (e.g., Helm, Kustomize) Monitoring and observability stack (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog) For Cloud Platform Focus - experience with: Major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) Cloud-native services and managed solutions
• For On-Premises Platform Focus - experience with: Virtualisation platforms (e.g., VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM) Configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef) Bare metal server management and data centre operations
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and automation tools.
• Understanding of cybersecurity concepts, including network security, identity management, and compliance frameworks.
• Knowledge of networking concepts including VPCs/VLANs, load balancers, DNS, and service mesh technologies.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation languages (e.g., Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go).
• Engineer desired skills and experience Having Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) background and experience, including familiarity with service level objects, incident management, and production system reliability practices.
• Experience with disaster recovery, backup strategies, and business continuity planning.
• Experience in high-availability, fault-tolerant system design and implementation.
• Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) environments experience.
• Basic understanding of data platform technologies and streaming systems.
• Understanding of cost optimisation strategies and financial management.
• Knowledge of compliance frameworks relevant to aviation and critical infrastructure systems.
• Your appointment designation will commensurate with your relevant work experience.
• Successful candidates will be offered a 3-year contract in the first instance, and may be considered for placement on a permanent tenure or subsequent contract renewal.