Engineering Lead, Cloud Automation

New, permanent role based out of either Brisbane or Sydney.

Hello. We’re Virgin Australia. We’re the airline that’s always done things a little different. Our way. The Virgin way. We’re on a mission to make flying better than ‘nice’. And to do that, it takes a team of talented people who are passionate about customer experience, doing the right thing always, with a focus on safety, in the air, on the ground and in our workplaces. A team who values real diversity and inclusion, in a big brand with big ambitions.

What you’ll be doing

As our Engineering Lead, Cloud Automation you’ll help design, build and continuously improve the secure, reliable and highly automated cloud platforms that support our technology teams.

With deep expertise in AWS and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), you’ll create reusable platform capabilities that enable our engineering teams to build, deploy and operate applications faster, safer and more consistently.

You’ll:

• Design, build and operate production-grade Amazon EKS platforms.
• Improve cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, workload onboarding and day-to-day platform operations.
• Build and maintain automated CI/CD and GitOps delivery pathways.
• Create reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, platform blueprints and automated guardrails.
• Improve the developer experience through self-service capabilities, golden paths and reusable deployment workflows.
• Strengthen platform reliability, observability, incident response and operational automation.
• Embed security, governance and cost optimisation into platform design.
• Explore practical uses of AI and generative AI to improve cloud operations, testing, documentation and engineering productivity.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers and contribute to platform roadmaps and engineering standards.

You’ll be great in this role if you have…

• Significant hands-on experience designing, building and operating production AWS environments.
• Deep experience with Amazon EKS and Kubernetes, including cluster architecture, networking, security, upgrades, autoscaling, observability and troubleshooting.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation or similar tooling.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD platforms and deployment automation.
• Experience with GitOps and tools such as Argo CD, Flux, Helm or Kustomize.
• Strong knowledge of AWS identity, networking, compute, storage, security and observability services.
• Experience with container security, Kubernetes RBAC, secrets management, image scanning and secure software supply chain practices.
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and operational runbooks for distributed systems.
• Programming or scripting capability in Python, Go, Bash, TypeScript, PowerShell or a comparable language.
• Experience leading technical initiatives, influencing engineering standards and mentoring other engineers.

Experience with internal developer platforms, FinOps, service mesh, multi-cluster Kubernetes, regulated environments or AI-enabled operations will be highly regarded.

We’re committed to looking after you, with some of the best benefits and conditions in the industry, including but not limited to:

• Discounted flights for you and your loved ones, including $1,000 worth of travel credits per year.
• A flexible, hybrid work style. Work from home or the office and adapt your location to suit your style and needs.
• One of Brisbane’s most admired head office locations, with South Bank train station, a supermarket, pharmacy and lunch options downstairs, plus a five-minute walk to the Busway, a rooftop restaurant, onsite gym and South Bank Parklands just across the road.
• Discounts on travel insurance, lounge membership, car hire, accommodation and experiences worldwide.
• Cheaper hospitality, retail, technology, beauty and wellness services.
• Free counselling and access to a wellbeing app to support your physical, mental, social and financial health.
• ‘Dress for Your Day’, giving you the freedom to wear whatever makes you feel great for the type of work you do and the day you have ahead of you.

When everyone is included, everyone wins

We’re all individuals. And we love that. That’s why we encourage applications from Indigenous Australians, people with disability, those from diverse cultural backgrounds, our friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who wants to join our family.

Ready to apply?

We’re ready to hear from you. Apply now.