Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

About Compare Club
At Compare Club, we exist to help everyday Australians save money on household expenses—from health and life insurance to energy and home loans. With a 500+ strong team across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and internationally, our platform powers smart comparison services that deliver real peace of mind.

We are fast-paced, tech-driven, and heavily investing in cutting-edge automation and AI across our entire ecosystem.

About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer to serve as the definitive technical authority for Compare Club’s cloud infrastructure. Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, Architecture and DevOps, this is a deeply hands-on technical leadership position (not a people management desk job).

You will spend the vast majority of your time building, automating, and engineering, while setting technical direction for, and mentoring, two experienced DevOps engineers based in Vietnam.

You will step into a platform mid-transformation: spanning a modern Terraform-managed ECS/Fargate environment alongside a legacy Elastic Beanstalk estate. You will own the architecture, finish the modernisation, eliminate key-person risk, and establish true operational and cost discipline—all under live ISO 27001:2022 and PCI DSS v4.0.1 certifications.

What You’ll Own:

• Architecture & Technical Authority: Chair the weekly platform review, set engineering standards, join the Architecture Review Board, and sign off on all AWS/GCP architecture and shared Terraform modules.
• Platform Modernisation & Delivery: Complete the delivery migration to GitHub Actions and GitOps-driven ECS releases, bring legacy Elastic Beanstalk under Terraform control, and retire end-of-life operating systems and runtimes.
• AI & Operational Automation: Write Python and Bash to eliminate manual toil, track DORA metrics (via DX), and deploy AI/agentic automation for self-healing remediation and intelligent incident triage.
• Security and compliance engineering: Partner with Cyber Security and IT Risk to keep our ISO 27001 and PCI DSS controls strong as the platform evolves.
• Cost & Observability Discipline: Consolidate logging/alerting across New Relic, CloudWatch, and Grafana; establish SLOs; and drive FinOps practices (containment of GPU/AI inference costs, right-sizing).
• Team Leadership & Key-Person Risk: Become a credible second pair of hands across all production domains, cross-train your Vietnam-based team, and design a reliable on-call rotation once runbooks and alerting are mature.

What You Bring:

• 8+ Years in Infrastructure / DevOps / Platform Engineering: Deep, current, production-grade AWS experience (ECS on EC2/Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, Aurora, ElastiCache, CloudFront, WAF, Route 53, IAM). Note: We run ECS, not Kubernetes!
• Infrastructure as Code at Scale: Expert Terraform skills (shared module libraries, remote state, drift detection, Chekhov scanning).
• Modern CI/CD & Delivery: Strong command of GitHub Actions, reusable workflows, OIDC federation, GitOps, and blue/green release strategies.
• DevSecOps in Regulated Environments: Proven background operating under formal frameworks like PCI DSS, ISO 27001, APRA CPS 234, or Essential Eight.
• Automation & AI Enthusiasm: Strong Python, Bash, and SQL scripting. A genuine desire to bring AI and agentic automation into daily platform operations and support AI workloads (AWS Bedrock, SageMaker).
• Leadership by Credibility: Ability to mentor distributed engineers, write documentation people actually read, and hold straight-shooting conversations with senior stakeholders about risk, cost, and trade-offs.

Why Join Us?

• Real Ownership: Design authority here is real and written into the role — you set the standards and you sign off the architecture.
• Tech-Forward Stack: Work with modern AWS services, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and cutting-edge AI platform foundations.
• Great Culture: Work alongside high-performing, collaborative teams in a fast-growing financial services environment.

Ready to lead our cloud platform into its next era? Click Apply Now to submit your CV!