Senior/Staff Platform Engineer

Role Description

This is a rare opportunity to shape a platform engineering function from its early days. You won't be inheriting someone else's decisions. You'll be defining the foundational systems, standards, and internal platforms that UpGuard's engineering organisation will build on for years.

As a Platform Engineer, you'll own the platforms, tools and infrastructure that power our development workflows, improving reliability, streamlining operations, and enhancing the developer experience across our product engineering teams. The function sits at the heart of our engineering organisation, and you'll have genuine autonomy and influence: defining the roadmap, driving best practices, and scaling our systems as we grow.

We're open to hiring at either the Senior or Staff level, and we'll calibrate the level, scope, and compensation based on your experience.

What will you do?

• Champion a "platform as a product" mindset, regularly gathering feedback from engineering teams and iterating to improve the developer experience
• Design, build and maintain scalable, reliable infrastructure on Google Cloud to support our growing product needs
• Collaborate closely with developers to streamline local and CI/CD workflows, and champion platform best practices
• Evolve our observability stack - ensuring teams have the monitoring, logging and alerting they need to move quickly and confidently
• Implement and maintain secure-by-default patterns for networking, secrets management, IAM, and workload isolation
• Accelerate and complete the adoption of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and GitOps to achieve consistent and auditable infrastructure changes

Qualifications

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (preferably Terraform/OpenTofu) on a major cloud platform (ideally Google Cloud)
• 5+ years of relevant engineering experience at tech-centric and ideally product-driven companies
• A strong software engineering foundation and a developer-first mindset
• Hands-on experience with containerization, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD pipelines
• A track record of improving developer experience through better tooling, streamlined workflows, and a documentation-first culture
• Experience with relational database design, performance tuning and operations at scale, ideally with PostgreSQL

What will give you an edge?

• Experience scaling infrastructure to support multi-region architectures and growing engineering teams
• Strong backend engineering skills, particularly in Go
• A practical approach to cloud cost optimisation, with experience in identifying and implementing efficiency improvements
• Experience building internal platforms as products - with a focus on roadmap definition, adoption and developer enablement
• Practical experience in product security, including embedding security best practices early in the SDLC and shifting security left

Benefits

• Monthly Lifestyle subsidy: Use this for financial, physical, and mental well-being
• WFH set-up allowance: To ensure you have the right environment to work in, we will help you get set up within your first 3 months at UpGuard
• $1500 USD annual Learning & Development allowance: To support your career development, all team members will be able to expense development opportunities against this allowance
• Annual leave: PTO plus two additional UpGuardian leave days to give you time to recharge your batteries.
• 18 weeks paid Parental Leave: Irrespective of parenting role
• Personal Leave Allowance: This includes sick & carer’s leave
• Fully remote working environment: While we have physical offices in Sydney & Hobart, we do not mandate compulsory attendance
• Top-spec hardware: All team members will be provided with top-spec laptops for their role
• Generative AI subsidy: UpGuard provides paid subscriptions for all team members to access generative AI tools to support their work