Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

Job Description

What you’ll do 

As Principal Cloud Platform Engineer, you’ll own the cloud foundation that Nearmap AI runs on. You’ll lead a team of up to three engineers, set the technical direction for the infrastructure layer beneath our machine learning platform, and stay hands-on in the systems you design. 

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, GPU fleets spanning two clouds, and production model endpoints behind customer products. Someone has to make that substrate reliable, secure, and affordable. That’s you. 

Reporting to the Director, AI Systems Engineering, you work side by side with the Principal AI Platform Engineer. They build the machine learning platform: workflow orchestration, distributed training, serving, and LLMOps. You build what it stands on: the Kubernetes fleet across AWS and GCP, GPU-capable compute, networking, identity, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and the observability and security foundations every AICV service depends on. 

To be clear about the boundary: you own the infrastructure platform, not the machine learning tooling that runs on it, and not the customer-facing AI products. Your first customer is AICV, and it is the most demanding infrastructure customer we have. What proves out there sets the pattern for the wider Nearmap developer platform, so you’ll co-own standards, paved paths, and shared components with the Platform team in ETO. 

Day to day, you’ll: 

• Own the technical direction for cloud infrastructure across AICV: Kubernetes fleet design on EKS and GKE, compute, networking, identity, and storage. 

• Design and operate GPU-capable compute — node pools, drivers, device plugins, autoscaling, and multi-tenant isolation — so the AI platform team schedules against it without thinking about the hardware. 

• Make the critical infrastructure design calls, and run technical evaluation and build-versus-buy with the Director and your AI platform counterpart. 

• Lead and mentor a team of up to three platform engineers, and own technical hiring for the team. 

• Write and own Terraform for the whole footprint, and build the self-service paths that let AICV teams provision what they need without raising a ticket. 

• Build the CI/CD and observability foundations that AICV services and the ML platform rely on: pipelines, metrics, logs, and traces. 

• Own reliability and cost for the infrastructure layer: service level objectives, cloud spend across AWS and GCP, capacity, and major incident response. You are on call for what you build. 

• Co-own the standards and paved paths of the wider Nearmap developer platform with the Platform team in ETO, so AICV patterns become company patterns. 

Cloud security 

Security is not a separate workstream here. It is a property of the platform you build, and you co-own it: you own the infrastructure controls, Security owns policy and standards, and the Platform team owns the company-wide pattern. 

• Least-privilege identity across AWS and GCP, secrets management, network segmentation, and private connectivity between clouds. 

• Supply chain and workload security for the fleet: container image scanning, admission policy, runtime controls, and CVE response. 

• Encryption, key management, and access control over the imagery and model artefacts AICV trains and infers on. 

• Controls enforced in code and in the pipeline, so the secure path is the default path. 
   

Qualifications

About you 

• You’re a systems thinker. You see the whole stack, and you know which layer a problem actually belongs to. 

• You build platforms, not tickets. You’d rather ship something a team can self-serve on than be the person they have to ask. 

• You’re a collaborative leader. You elevate your team by sharing knowledge, setting high standards, and fostering an environment where the best ideas win. 

• You take ultimate ownership. You’re relentless about reliability, security, and cost for everything you and your team run. 

• You’re a builder first. You’ve earned the right to set direction because you’ve operated the systems you’re now designing. You still open the editor. 

What you’ll bring 

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with at least 4 years focused on building and operating large-scale cloud platforms 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 Kubernetes at scale (EKS or GKE), including node pool and GPU compute management. 

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

• Strong grounding in cloud networking, identity and access management, and secrets management, with the judgment to design for least privilege. 

• Production-quality Python or Go for platform tooling, and practical depth in modern software 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 

• GPU infrastructure at fleet scale: NVIDIA drivers and device plugins, MIG or time-slicing, and multi-cloud capacity strategy. 

• Multi-tenant Kubernetes: namespace isolation, resource quotas, admission policies, and abstractions such as custom operators or Crossplane. 

• Running infrastructure beneath ML workloads such as Argo Workflows, Ray, or Kubeflow, even without owning the ML layer yourself. 

• GitOps and progressive delivery at scale: ArgoCD or Flux, with canary and blue-green strategies. 

• FinOps across more than one cloud: tagging, rightsizing, commitment strategy, and GPU utilisation reporting. 

• Cloud security and compliance, including SOC 2 and the NIST Cyber Security Framework. 

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

Additional Information

Why you’ll love 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. 

In addition to your annual leave, Nearmap offers: 

• 4 extra “YOU” days off each year. Take a break, no questions asked. 

• Company-sponsored volunteering days to give back. 

• Generous parental leave policies for growing families. 

• Work from Overseas Policy: explore the world in the approved list of cities while you work. 

• Discounted Private Health Insurance plans. 

• A Nearmap subscription (naturally). 

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.

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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.