GCP Platform Engineer: Scale, Secure & Ship in Sydney

At Pet Circle, we believe pets deserve the very best, and the people who love them deserve a better way to care for them. Since 2011, we've grown from that single idea into Australia's biggest online pet retailer, with around 500 Pet Circlers across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, reshaping how pet parents discover, choose and receive what their pets need. Pet care is a $15 billion industry in Australia, and as pet ownership continues to grow, so do the expectations of modern pet parents. They want expert advice, personalised experiences, convenience and reliability, all delivered seamlessly. That's where we come in. We're building the future of pet care through technology, innovation and a deep understanding of what pets and their people need.

The role involves building the cloud infrastructure, tooling and CI/CD pipelines that Pet Circle's engineering squads ship on, enabling them to deliver at speed on a platform they can trust. This is a building role, not a run-and-maintain one: lead the future design of production infrastructure for scale on Google Cloud Platform, automate daily administrative tasks that enable our rapid growth, and own your area broadly.

You’ll report to the Director of Technical Operations while partnering closely with the engineering squads, Staff Engineers and Tech Leads who build the product.

What you’ll be working on:

• Lead the oversight, future design, and deployment of production cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), optimising for scale, reliability, and availability.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code with Terraform (Pulumi is transferable), focusing on building reproducible, auditable, and automated server infrastructure.
• Help build, maintain and speed up the CI/CD pipelines the engineering squads rely on to ship safely at pace.
• Containerise and run services with Docker to support modern application management.
• Embed a "shift left" security philosophy throughout the development lifecycle.
• Strengthen Pet Circle's perimeter by managing Web Application Firewalls (WAF) to protect against malicious traffic, and harden the "front door" of our services using robust API Gateway management, rate limiting, and secure authentication protocols.
• Enhance vulnerability remediation, identity and access management (Google Identity Platform, JumpCloud, or similar), and establish rigorously tested recovery objectives.
• Own observability, performance tuning, monitoring, alerting and logging, so platform or system issues are understood before they reach customers.
• Embed with the engineering squads, understand their friction points, and build a platform roadmap that makes shipping easier.
• Identify high-risk legacy components and plan their removal.
• Support cloud cost efficiency, right-sizing and optimising GCP spend.
• Respond to complex production incidents, perform deep root cause analysis in conjunction with engineering teams, and implement long-term fixes.

What we're looking for:

• 5+ years in systems/software engineering with a strong focus on SRE and DevOps paradigms.
• Deep, hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience.
• Strong proficiency with Cloudflare, WAF configurations, and API Gateway management.
• You treat developer tools like a product, focusing on reducing friction and cognitive load for your internal "customers" (the developers).
• Experience with Terraform in production environments, including complex state management.
• Experience designing pipelines real teams deploy through, utilising tools like GitHub Actions (GitLab is transferable).
• Hands-on with Docker and a solid background in Linux. Knowledge of Python is preferred.
• Experience in building and improving security and disaster recovery.
• An experienced engineer who's energised by building the platform, comfortable owning a broad scope in a lean team.
• You communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Where you'll work:

This is a Sydney-based role. Our office sits on top of Wynyard station, it's pet-friendly, and we work flexibly, a mix of office and home.

A few good things:

• Heaps of development opportunities - lunch & learns, secondments & unlimited learning courses via Go1.
• Flexible working environment.
• Up to 50% employee discount.
• Product sample giveaways.
• Pawrental leave and wellbeing leave.
• Volunteer days for the causes you care about.
• Fitness corporate partnership.

Why you'll want in:

Looking after pets, and the pet parents who love them, is what gets us out of bed. You'll own your patch and have the room to act on it. We move fast and decide fast, and we'd rather test an idea and learn from it than sit on it. You'll have rich, real-time data at your fingertips to back your thinking, and the freedom to chase an opportunity the moment you spot one.

We're better together. We operate with humble hearts and hungry minds. Pets matter, so pets and pet parents always have a seat at our table. We're instinctively curious. Always. Everyone (& their pets) Welcome.

We're better when we don't all think the same. Different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences make our work sharper and our days more interesting, so whoever you are, if this role excites you we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't tick every box.