Melbourne CBD (5 Days On-Site) | Australian Citizenship Required (AGSVA Eligibility)
About the Opportunity Emanate Technology is partnering with one of the world's leading hyperscale cloud providers to scale their specialized Australian sovereign cloud program in Melbourne. This is the engineering group responsible for designing, building, and operating highly secure cloud infrastructure for the country's most sensitive national security and government workloads.
Internally, this position is titled Senior Systems Development Engineer, but the closest market equivalent is an engineering-focused Senior SRE. This is a hands-on role where you own the architecture and design of complex distributed systems, but you remain deeply technical writing code and managing the underlying infrastructure.
The Technical Reality This is not a standard DevOps or Cloud Architect role. You will not just be writing Terraform modules, managing Kubernetes deployments, or building on top of managed commercial cloud services. You will be building the underlying cloud itself. The profile requires a true hybrid of two distinct halves:
- Software Engineering:
You will write robust, production-grade software from scratch (in Python, Go, Java, C++, or TypeScript) to build core control planes, self-healing workflows, and automation tooling.
- Deep Systems/Linux Grit:
You will own the health of the underlying infrastructure. You must be comfortable stepping away from high-level abstractions to troubleshoot at the bare-metal OS layer (diagnosing kernel panics, network latency, and memory management on Linux).
- Architecting, designing, and deploying complex, highly available distributed systems at massive scale.
- Writing high-quality code to fix bugs, automate manual toil, and deal with infrastructural components within large-scale systems.
- Acting as the highest level of technical escalation, diagnosing broken systems and finding root causes at the OS and network layer.
- Raising the engineering bar across the team through system design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring.
- Citizenship:
Due to strict federal security requirements, you absolutely must be an Australian Citizen
and eligible to obtain a high-level Australian Government Security Clearance (AGSVA).
- Location:
This role requires working 5 days a week on-site
in a highly secure Melbourne CBD office.
- Experience & Mindset:
Deep, demonstrable expertise in Linux/Unix systems engineering and operations, paired with strong professional software development capabilities (Python, Go, Java, etc.).
- Architecture:
Proven experience independently designing, building, and scaling complex distributed systems in production.
- The Scale:
The quality of engineering at this tier of tech company is exceptionally high. The scale of the problems you will solve here is incredibly difficult to replicate anywhere else in the Australian market.
- The Clearance:
The client will fully sponsor your high-level government security clearance. This is a permanent career asset that opens doors across the defense and national security sectors.
- Total Target Compensation (TTC):
You will be offered a genuinely lucrative compensation package combining base salary, substantial cash sign-on bonuses (paid out across the first two years), and RSUs on a four-year vesting cycle.
We are an inclusive employer committed to fostering a diverse and accessible workplace. We encourage applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of all ages, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
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