System Development Engineer in Sydney

G'day! You've found an opportunity that could define your next chapter. Applicants must be Australian citizens and hold or be eligible to obtain an Australian Government Security Clearance with the ability to successfully complete an Organisational Suitability Assessment. More information regarding security clearances can be found at AGSVA. Based in Sydney or Melbourne — we offer relocation support for candidates moving from other states.

The Mission - Why This Program, Why Now? You're joining at the defining moment of one of the most significant technology programmes Australia has ever undertaken. This programme will build and operate the dedicated cloud giving Australia's national security community and its allies the capability to see more, share more, innovate and act faster than ever before. The architectural decisions being made now - how we structure networking, implement security controls, and automate at scale - will shape how Australia's national security community operates for the next decade. You won't be inheriting someone else's design choices. You'll be making them.

Your Opportunity: What if you could build the cloud rather than just use it? As a System Development Engineer, you'll be the force behind the software services and platforms that build, operate, monitor, and assure the network within an entire region. You won't just be maintaining systems — you'll be inventing the automation and tooling that transforms how one of the world's largest cloud networks operates. This role sits at a unique intersection of software engineering and operational excellence.

Benefits:

• Learning & development: AWS training and certification support, access to internal learning platforms.
• Health, income protection and life cover: Amazon subsidises private health insurance premiums, and group salary continuance and life insurance are included at no cost to you.
• Military differential pay launching in Australia: Australian employees taking defence reserve leave may receive up to 52 weeks of military differential pay to help cover the difference in pay while serving.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for you and your family - mental health, financial coaching, legal questions, and everyday life events.
• Family-building benefit: Access to Maven for fertility treatment, adoption support, surrogacy, and parenting coaching.
• Amazon Extras & employee discount: cashback and discounts across hundreds of retail, fitness, travel, and lifestyle partners.

Key job responsibilities:

• You'll own the software services and platforms that keep the AWS network running within the region — and you'll continuously reinvent them to be better, faster, and more resilient.
• You'll manage service deployments, troubleshoot operational issues, and maintain service health — but you'll spend the majority of your time driving permanent solutions that eliminate recurring problems, developing automation that minimises human intervention, and collaborating with global service teams to enhance stability and functionality.
• You'll design and implement entirely new software components, products, and services that improve operational efficiency on behalf of your network engineer customers.
• When technical issues arise, you'll investigate them thoroughly — diagnosing at the code or systems level, performing root cause analysis, implementing long-term fixes, and articulating technical requirements back to service owners with clarity and precision.
• You'll take ownership of in-house services developed specifically for this environment, carrying full-stack development responsibilities from design and implementation through to operational management and continuous improvement.
• You'll build reliable deployment mechanisms and monitoring solutions that address unique environmental challenges.
• Communication is central to your impact. You'll regularly interact with global service teams who have limited visibility into the environment, providing clear explanations of complex situations and building the relationships that ensure successful deployments and effective problem resolution.

A day in the life:

Your morning begins with a health check across the services your team owns — reviewing deployment pipelines, scanning monitoring dashboards, and confirming that overnight automated processes completed successfully. You notice a service deployment that partially failed and begin investigating, tracing the issue through logs and system state to identify the root cause. By mid-morning, you're deep in code. A recurring operational issue has been consuming team hours, and you're building the automation that will eliminate it permanently.

About the team:

The Systems Development team manages all of the software services and platforms that builds, operates, monitors and assures the AWS network within entire regions. We design and implement automation and new software solutions to improve operational efficiency on behalf of our Network Engineer customers.

Diverse Experiences: AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience in automating, deploying, and supporting large-scale infrastructure.
• Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, C++, C#, Rust.
• Experience with Linux/Unix.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines build processes.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems at scale.