Cloud Platform Engineer

Operations      ·      Brisbane/ Remote     ·    Full time

This role is available for applicants based in Brisbane as well as for remote candidates within Australia.

Max Kelsen is an industry-leading artificial intelligence and software engineering agency. We have been named AWS Data, Analytics and Machine Learning Partner of the Year, ranked 29th on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list for 2020, as well as 64th overall and 13th within Australia in the Financial Times Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies list for 2021.

Why Max Kelsen?

We are a rapidly growing company that believes in providing opportunities for career progression. Culturally we want our team to be open, honest, and challenge each other to be better. This does not mean we are perfect, but it does mean that we have a burning desire to keep on improving.

When you come on board at Max Kelsen, you will tackle challenging problems and work with interesting clients including Fortune 500 companies, often building solutions that have never been implemented before. Recently, these have included an application that helps to slow degenerative eye disease in children, and another that improves the effectiveness of skin cancer therapies.

The Role:

The vast majority of Max Kelsen solutions are developed with a cloud-native approach. This means a couple of things for a Platform Engineer at MK;

You will regularly be collaborating with a team of engineers (primarily backend/cloud but commonly machine learning as well) in order to design reliable, scalable and maintainable solutions to the problems that we solve. These problems come in a very varied range, from large batch style asynchronous machine learning workflows to serverless on-demand workflows with human in the loop capabilities, to simpler CRUD-style web applications no two projects are exactly alike, so while experience in specific types of systems is great, we value the ability to critically think about the problems that we are solving and to design a solution that meets the requirements (business level, security, networking, storage, and service level) we have.

Platform Engineers at MK dabble in application development as well (primarily in Python) – sometimes it just makes sense for the same person to be across the whole solution, from design to build to deploy. Don’t worry if you haven’t done a lot of this before, every person in our team has different strengths – the only thing we have a hard requirement for is a willingness to learn!

• You will be handling containerized applications (both built by you, and built by others) – it’s the main way we package and deploy our production code. Familiarity with Docker and ways of working with containers are highly desirable – things like layer caching, image size minimization, security awareness etc.
• You will be writing infrastructure code regularly – the majority of any cloud infrastructure deployed at MK is written as Terraform modules, with AWS CloudFormation being used when suitable. This includes things like monitoring, alerting and observability components to solutions as well. Platform Engineers are tasked with refining some of our pre-existing IaC modules as well as creating new ones to fill gaps in our catalogue. We also employ IaC testing so while past experience in this is not required, you should be prepared to upskill in a small subset of GoLang.
• You will be exposed to a diverse range of cloud provider services. While experience with core AWS or GCP services is helpful, what we value most is experience with concepts that can be applied (albeit with slight deviations due to specific service limitations) to multiple clouds. Concepts like IAM, data storage and encryption (KMS, S3/GCS, SQL vs NoSQL datastores), serverless compute (Lambda/Cloud Run/Cloud Functions), container orchestration/Kubernetes (ECS/Fargate/AppEngine/EKS/GKE), secret management (AWS & GCP SecretsManager/Parameter Store) form the backbone to most solutions we develop.
• You should be comfortable managing infrastructure and environments using CI/CD practices. We build, package, version, and deploy all code (application, infrastructure and Machine Learning) in CI/CD workflows using mainly GitHub Actions. Experience in any CI concepts rather than specific frameworks is what we are looking for: dividing processes up into different workflows/jobs, optimising caching, building reusable components to help standardise across our projects, working through multiple compute environments, providing visibility to deployments etc. Sometimes this also involves writing small glue scripts in python/bash in order to get the functionality/flow that we desire, so experience scripting is definitely helpful.
• Ultimately, you should be comfortable working to general software engineering best practices: version control, code reviews, working in shared codebases/monorepos as well as standalone projects, and motivation to produce readable and clean code.
• Finally, you will be responsible for sharing all the cool stuff you are building with other people – documenting things like solution design and architecture diagrams for handover to clients (both technical and non-technical), as well as things like new tools/processes for upskilling our team internally.

Required skills:

• Experience working with Agile software development practices in a DevOps environment
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform, Cloudformation)
• Proficient with Docker and Kubernetes
• Proficient in common scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, Powershell)
• Experience designing and building cloud solution environments on AWS and/or GCP, as well as experience with container orchestration services using ECS / EKS / GKE
• AWS and/or GCP Certifications are desirable, however, we can facilitate obtaining these certifications through our Partner Programs
• Strong knowledge of IP networking, DNS, load balancing and CDN’s

About Max Kelsen:

Some companies are product or service centric, but we are people centric. Without our unique, diverse team we wouldn’t be able to do the work we do. Every day we strive to make Max Kelsen a place where everyone feels seen, heard and valued. Our team is encouraged to ask questions, offer solutions and be included in our journey.

In terms of working remotely or from home, we fully endorse this and support our teams to work from wherever they do their best work. We provide all the necessary equipment to work from home including monitors, keyboard, mice, and noise cancelling headphones. Our focus is delivering great outcomes for our clients, not clocking up excessive hours each week.

Enjoy an additional day of birthday leave, 2 days of charity leave to support a cause you’re passionate about, and utilise 5 days of professional development leave to ensure your career prospects continue to grow.

We value spending time together and creating strong connections, so we bring the team together a few days a month for what we call Deep Bond Days. We hold a monthly Town Hall and team BBQ at the office to ensure everyone is kept up to date on changes across the organisation. We also have an active social club with frequent lunches, talks and free social events. Previous events have included private cinema screenings, trivia nights, various sporting activities, and more.

Please click here to apply.