Job Description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer – AI-First Strategy | Java | 96% Cloud Hosted
$180,000-$220,000 + super + bonus
Sydney, 3 days in office, 2 days from home

Want to shape how AI gets used in real SRE teams?

This team is building something rare: a hands-on SRE role where you’ll still code ~70% of the time, but with AI doing the heavy lifting across observability, triage, and incident response.

You’ll still be writing Java, but now your work will shape how systems scale, recover, and self-heal. With AI tools doing the grunt work (anomaly detection, auto-remediation, predictive alerting).

It’s rare to get in early on this kind of shift. You’d help choose the tools, define the process, and influence how reliability is done across the org. 

And you’ll walk away with a skillset that very few SREs in AU have today.

No more staring at dashboards trying to connect noisy logs. You’ll work on meaningful problems, not just operational noise.

• You’ll spend less time reacting and more time engineering, designing scalable systems, improving performance, and building internal tools
  
  

• You’ll learn modern AI/ML ops practices that very few engineers in Australia are exposed to right now
  
  

• You’ll be early in the AI shift, which means influence: help pick tools, shape internal processes, and lead new initiatives

You won’t be stuck in process-heavy enterprise chaos either. The team runs like a scale-up and has a modern stack. You’ll be in the office 3 days a week with 2 days WFH with flexibility where needed.

96% cloud-hosted (GCP & AWS). 1,000s of microservices. Heavy Kubernetes, Terraform, event-driven architecture. Platform operating model with high engineering autonomy.

All led by an ex-Google SRE who’s building reliability the right way.  No legacy spaghetti, no 2am pager duty, and no red tape.

If you’re a backend or SRE-minded engineer who wants to stay close to code but work at a different layer of impact, this could be your next move.

You’ll gain rare, future-proof skills, help shape how AI is adopted into engineering culture, and be part of something still early,  but backed by the stability of a global platform.

Interested? Let’s chat.

Contact Julien Bicknell at The Onset. You can email me, julien@theonset.com.au or call, 0406 158 832.

Don’t worry if your CV isn’t up to date. Just send what you have and we’ll deal with that later.