Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

Company Description

Nearmap is unique. An Australian global technology company with incredible people; a market-leader with energy and spirit. Nearmap was named as one of the world’s 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2020 by Fast Company magazine – and we’re growing.

Nearmap provides a virtual model of the real world – at a scale and detail that hasn’t been done before. Our ambition is to be the source of truth that shapes our liveable world. At Nearmap, we have an appetite for energetic and engaged people and we are currently seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to join our DevOps team. 

Job Description

As Principal AI Platform Engineer, you’ll be the key architect and technical owner of the platform that powers Nearmap AI innovation. You’ll lead a team of 3 to 4 mid-level and senior engineers, set the technical vision for our ML infrastructure, and drive its evolution. 

This is a leadership role for a seasoned engineer who thinks in systems. Nearmap captures and processes aerial imagery at a scale that breaks most infrastructure: thousands of EKS nodes running batch inference, distributed GPU training across two clouds, real-time model endpoints behind customer products, and LLM and agentic systems moving from prototype into production. You won’t only build on that platform. You’ll define what it becomes. 

Reporting to the Director, AICV Platform Engineering, your customers are the AICV product teams: AI Model R&D, Computer Vision, Insurance Data Science, Agentic AI, and AI Map Data. Your objective is a robust, scalable, efficient ecosystem that acts as a force multiplier for the whole AI organisation. 

To be clear about the boundary: this is a platform role, not an application role. You build what those teams build on, not the customer-facing products themselves. 

Day to day, you’ll: 

• Define and own the technical roadmap for core ML infrastructure: workflow orchestration on Kubernetes, distributed training, batch inference at thousands-of-nodes scale, real-time serving on Ray, and LLMOps. 

• Make the critical design calls and evaluate new technologies, from orchestrators and serving frameworks to vector databases. 

• Lead and mentor a team of 3 to 4 mid-level and senior ML systems engineers, and own technical hiring for the platform team. 

• Spearhead the highest-risk work yourself: multi-cloud GPU capacity strategy, foundational platform components, and the observability stack. 

• Write production Python for the hardest parts of the shared platform, and prototype new capabilities before the team commits to them. 

• Establish and champion MLOps and AIOps best practice across the organisation, covering automation, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and security through the AI lifecycle. 

• Partner with Data Science and ML Engineering teams, turning their challenges into an actionable platform roadmap. 

• Own service level objectives and GPU cost efficiency across AWS and GCP, lead major incident response, and build detection for the ways production ML fails quietly. 

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 4 years focused on building and operating large-scale infrastructure, platform engineering, or distributed systems in production. 

• Proven experience leading technical projects and mentoring or managing a team of engineers. 

• Deep, production-level expertise designing, building, and operating systems on Kubernetes, including GPU scheduling. 

• Expert-level Python, and the distributed systems judgment to reason clearly about failure, backpressure, and cost at scale. 

• Hands-on experience building and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi or similar). 

• Strong, practical grounding in modern software development practice: Git, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and automated testing. 

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. 

Highly desirable 

• Workflow orchestration frameworks such as Argo Workflows, Kubeflow Pipelines, Flyte, or Ray and KubeRay. 

• Designing and managing large-scale, GPU-intensive ML workloads, and GPU capacity strategy across more than one cloud. 

• Deep familiarity with the MLOps and LLMOps ecosystem: model registries, feature stores, serving frameworks, vector databases, and RAG systems. 

• Advanced Kubernetes concepts, including custom operators, and multi-cluster networking. 

• Petabyte-scale data pipelines, or geospatial and computer vision workloads. 

• A track record of contributing to open-source projects in the cloud-native or MLOps space. 

Additional Information

Some of our benefits

Nearmap takes a holistic approach to our employees’ emotional, physical and financial wellness. Some of our current benefits include:

• Quarterly wellbeing day off - Four additional days off a year as your "YOU" days
• Access to LinkedIn Learning
• Team Hackathons and Pitch-fests
• Wellbeing and technology allowance
• Annual flu vaccinations
• Nearmap subscription (of course!)
• Stocked kitchen with access to all the sustenance you need
• In-office Lunch every Tuesday and Thursday at our Sydney CBD office
• Showers available for anyone cycling to work or lunchtime gym-goers!

Working at Nearmap

We move fast and work smart; often wearing multiple hats. We adapted to remote working with ease and are continually looking at ways to improve. We’re proud of our inclusive, supportive culture, and maintain a safe environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be themselves.

If you can see yourself working at Nearmap and feel you have the right level of experience, we invite you to get in touch. 

Watch our culture video below to find out more about what a day in the life at Nearmap looks like.

Thanks, but we got this! Nearmap does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies and search firms. Please do not email or send unsolicited resumes to any Nearmap employee, location or address. Nearmap is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Some of our benefits:

Nearmap takes a holistic approach to our employees’ emotional, physical and financial wellness. Some of our current benefits include:

• Quarterly wellbeing day off - Four additional days off annually for your 'YOU' Days
• Wellbeing and technology allowance
• Annual flu vaccinations
• Hybrid flexibility for this role
• Nearmap subscription (of course!)
• Stocked kitchen with access to all the snacks you need
• In-office lunch every Tuesday and Thursday at our Sydney CBD office
• Showers available for anyone cycling to work or lunchtime gym-goers!

Why you'll love working at Nearmap:

We move fast and work smart; often wearing multiple hats. We’re proud of our inclusive, supportive culture, and maintain a safe environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be themselves.

Learn More About The Work We Do

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Thanks, but we got this! Nearmap does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies and search firms. Please do not email or send unsolicited resumes to any Nearmap employee, location or address. Nearmap is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.