Staff Infrastructure Platform Engineer

Purpose

Make it faster and safer for every Gridsight product team to ship, by solving shared infrastructure, reliability and developer experience problems once instead of in every team.

Gridsight builds grid analytics software for electricity utilities in Australia, New Zealand and the US. Our customers run critical infrastructure, so the platform under our product has to be secure, observable and dependable. This role builds that platform.

Where the role sits

You'll be the first staff engineer (and first IC) on Gridsight's new Infrastructure Platform team. You'll collaborate with a Head of Platform (open role) to help set the team's technical direction, with support from engineering leadership. To start with you'll be a band of one: owning problems end to end across teams and functions, while we build the team out around you.

• The Infrastructure Platform team is a true platform team in Team Topologies terms: it builds and runs internal products that other teams self-serve. Your customers are our product teams (Grid Visibility, Flex, Connections, Grid Modelling Tooling) and our pillar teams (Data Platform and Grid Modelling Engine).
• It sits alongside our Experience Platform and Agentic Platform teams. Together these three own the shared foundations that product teams build on.
• Infrastructure Platform builds the substrate and building blocks for self serve: cloud infrastructure, compute, IAM, CI/CD, environments and observability.
• IT Ops owns our corporate IT and its compliance controls. You'll partner with them on SOC 2 and customer security reviews: they cover corporate controls, you cover production infrastructure, and together you make compliance evidence come straight from the platform.
• You'll join the on-call rotation and help shape how we run incidents as our incident management practice matures.

Key accountabilities

• Observability. Build and run our metrics, tracing, logging and alerting platform, and set the patterns that let each team own its own observability over time.
• Delivery and environments. Evolve and consolidate our deployment pipelines, release management and infrastructure-as-code. Own environment management and test infrastructure, with the goal of shorter lead times and faster CI feedback.
• Secure, multi-region infrastructure. Design infrastructure that is secure by default, cost-effective and ready for multi-tenant, multi-region delivery across Australia, New Zealand and the US. Work with IT Ops to build SOC 2 controls and evidence into the platform, so teams meet compliance by default rather than by manual effort.
• Reliability practice. Help define SLOs and error budgets, improve how we respond to and learn from incidents, and take a turn on call.
• Developer experience. Treat internal engineers as customers. Seek out their friction, measure their satisfaction, and build tools and abstractions they choose to adopt.
• AI-assisted delivery. Leverage AI-assisted development tooling to accelerate delivery and raise the bar on what a small team can ship.
• Raising the bar. Mentor engineers across teams and shift how the organisation thinks about reliability, operability and developer experience. Run the platform as a product, with clear interfaces, docs and support, so teams self-serve rather than queue for help.

What makes this a Staff role

This is not a senior engineer with a bigger backlog. At Staff level we expect you to (in collaboration with engineering leadership):

• Help set technical direction for platform work across every team, and own a platform roadmap that runs over multiple quarters.
• Shape decisions you don't own, by writing clear proposals and bringing other teams with you.
• Find the highest-leverage problems yourself, rather than waiting for them to be handed to you.
• Define the systems and practices others work within, not just work within them well.
• Help shape the Infrastructure Platform team from day one, including its early roadmap and how it engages with product teams.

How we'll know it's working

• Lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and time to restore are measured and improving.
• CI feedback is fast and reliable enough that engineers stop working around it.
• Product teams own their own dashboards and alerts, and on-call engineers find problems before customers do.
• Developer satisfaction with the platform is measured regularly and trending up.
• SOC 2 evidence comes straight from the platform, with no manual collection before an audit.
• Our infrastructure-as-code matches what's actually running, and the legacy estate is retired.
• Out-of-hours pages are measured per system and falling.

What you'll bring

• ~8 or more years in software engineering, with recent work at Staff level (or clearly operating at it) in platform, infrastructure or SRE.
• Deep experience running cloud infrastructure in production, including compute, networking, storage, IAM and cost management, with strong infrastructure-as-code skills (AWS and Terraform preferred).
• A track record of building and operating observability platforms that teams actually rely on.
• Hands-on SRE practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident response and runbooks.
• Experience on a platform team in a product engineering organisation, running the platform as a product that teams adopt willingly.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a habit of setting direction and driving outcomes without close supervision.
• Fluency in the use of AI-assisted development tools - you're already using agentic coding tools, LLM-assisted workflows, or similar to accelerate your work.

Nice to have

• Scaling observability at high data volumes.
• Building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling with a strong developer experience focus.
• Familiarity working with data intensive systems and environments
• Authentication and identity in multi-tenant SaaS (Auth0, Azure AD, SAML/SSO, OIDC).
• Security and compliance work such as SOC 2, or in highly regulated environments.
• Resilience practices such as chaos engineering or game days.
• Energy, utilities or other critical infrastructure domains.
• Open-source contributions, conference talks or technical writing.

Technical knowledge

• Cloud architecture on AWS: networking, compute, storage, security and cost optimisation.
• Infrastructure-as-code design and lifecycle, ideally Terraform.
• Containers and orchestration (we use ECS), and the deployment patterns around them.
• CI/CD pipeline design and release strategies such as blue-green, canary and progressive delivery.
• Observability systems: metrics, distributed tracing, log aggregation and alerting.
• Security fundamentals: IAM, network segmentation and secrets management.
• Multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure patterns.

Learn more

• Brendan Banfield (CEO at Gridsight) in conversation with James Cameron (Partner at Airtree)
• Gridsight's work with Endeavour Energy to deliver flexible exports
• The problem space we're tackling