Director, Infrastructure and Platform in Adelaide

The Director, Infrastructure & Platform leads the team that creates standard, reliable environments on which Defense & Systems builds, tests, and delivers software. The team owns the secure platforms, shared services, and the single golden-path delivery pipeline that the organization's software developers depend on, ensuring delivery is dependable, on time, and to standard. The role runs the platform as a product, not as a help desk.

This is a people-leadership role accountable for both the operating model and the people who run it. The Director sets the platform roadmap and service standards, mandates the golden path that product teams adopt, and holds the team to FLIGHT DECK standard work and a bias toward flow. Success improves Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost by removing undifferentiated infrastructure work from every software team and replacing ad-hoc environments with a governed, consumable platform.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Team leadership and talent
  • Lead and develop the Infrastructure & Platform team — technical program management, platform and infrastructure engineering, and infrastructure architecture — with clear role clarity, objectives, and standard work for each seat.
  • Own the team's performance and development; build a culture of ownership, flow, and continuous improvement.
  • Identify and remove obstacles on behalf of the team, and coach problem-solving at the point of work.
• Platform operating model and governance
  • Own and mandate a single golden-path delivery pipeline — CI/CD, environments, and shared services — that all product teams adopt, and govern the exception process when a team cannot.
  • Operate the platform as a product: a named backlog, a published roadmap, and service standards for availability, support, change management, and SLAs.
  • Establish how platform change is requested, prioritized, approved, and released, and make that governance visible to the teams it affects.
  • Partner with Cyber Security to build security best practice into the platform by default, and scope the DevSecOps capability gap as an explicit Phase 2 headcount ask.
• Delivery and reliability
  • Ensure secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments in a defense context.
  • Set the operating rhythm — daily management, WOR, and MOR — that keeps reliability and delivery managed, not merely reported.
  • Partner with the four product-development software teams so the platform meets their current needs and anticipates their future ones.
• Cross-organization alignment
  • Represent Infrastructure & Platform in the Tech Ops leadership cadence and align the platform roadmap to the enterprise and CDAIO baseline.
  • Partner with the Director, Architecture & Data so platform patterns and architecture guardrails stay coupled.

Basic qualifications (required)

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited university or college with a minimum of 7 years of professional experience OR Associate's degree with a minimum of 10 years of professional experience OR High School Diploma with a minimum of 12 years of professional experience.
• Minimum 6 years of professional experience in Infrastructure & Platform Engineering or IT.
• Minimum 3 years of experience leading technical teams.

Desired characteristics (preferred, not mandatory)

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Engineering.
• Experience building and running an internal platform or paved-road capability as a product, with defined service levels.
• Platform engineering and site reliability engineering (SRE) background: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and on-call operations.
• Working knowledge of cloud (AWS or Azure), hybrid, and edge environments.
• Demonstrated understanding of FLIGHT DECK, Lean, or a comparable operating model (e.g., Scaled Agile Framework, continuous improvement).
• Track record leading and developing technical teams across a complex, matrixed organization.
• Ability to drive adoption of a shared standard across teams that do not report to you.
• Defense, aerospace, or other regulated or export-controlled environment background.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a US Government SECRET security clearance.

Success metrics

• Product teams on the golden-path pipeline — adoption rate across the four software teams.
• Platform availability and reliability against published SLAs.
• Delivery improvement for teams on the platform: lead time and deployment frequency (DORA).
• Change failure rate and time-to-restore for platform services.
• Team health: role clarity in place, objectives set, and engagement sustained.

Why this role

Defense & Systems is building a software and data factory, not just products, and this team owns the factory floor. You will decide the paved road every software team drives on, run the platform as a governed product, and lead the people who build and operate it. The mandate is to make dependable delivery the default, and the result shows up in every team's lead time.