This isn’t a role for someone who wants an established playbook. It's for someone who wants to write it.

You're a Principal Engineer who likes fixing problems, not just maintaining polished systems.

You enjoy early-stage challenges, where velocity matters. The paint’s still wet. And your decisions shape what “good” looks like for years. That’s exactly what you’ll get here.

You'll join a 300-person defence tech company tackling some of the most complex technical problems in modern warfare. Think drones, RF, AI/ML, and sensor fusion. 

After doubling headcount in the last two years (and raising $250M in 2024), they're scaling up platform engineering to keep pace.

This role? It’s a mix of hands-on and strategic.

You’ll work with the Platform Engineering Manager and soon two new seniors you'll help hire. You'll lead internal tooling, CI/CD, observability, infrastructure as code, and developer experience across the org.

The current setup prioritised speed-to-market. Now you'll add rigour, without losing that speed.

Tech you’ll touch: GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes, Observability, Python & Go. The usual suspects.

Based from Sydney HQ with 3 days in office, 2 from home. You'll have a massive impact on how software is built and delivered.

The mission? Make the world safer, with systems that work at scale, and dev workflows that don’t suck.

If you’ve driven adoption of platform tooling, automated pipelines, helped teams ship faster, and nudged orgs along the DevSecOps maturity curve, we’d love to chat.

To find out more, you can contact Julien Bicknell at The Onset. Either send me an email with your questions, julien@theonset.com.au or call me on 0406 158 832.

Don't worry about updating your CV, we can deal with that later.