Platform Engineering Lead

About Wenco International Mining Systems

Wenco International Mining Systems, a subsidiary of Hitachi Construction Machinery, delivers advanced technological solutions to mining and material handling industries to promote sustainable and safe operational practices. With research and development centers in Canada and Australia, this role is based in Brisbane, Queensland.

Role Summary

The Platform Engineering Lead will be responsible for designing, managing, and optimizing the infrastructure environments, deployment pipelines, and monitoring tools that support Wenco's next-generation fleet management and mining operations software. These environments include both cloud-hosted deployments managed by Wenco and customer-maintained on-premises systems located at mining sites.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead planning and operation of development, testing, and production environments using Infrastructure as Code, specifically with Terraform, ensuring stable cloud infrastructure management.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines with Azure DevOps to enable consistent, reliable application deployment.
• Architect pipelines that separate infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and configuration changes to be independently deployable.
• Manage observability tools such as structured logging, health monitoring, metrics collection, and alerting systems across all environments.
• Collaborate closely with the Tier 3 support team to establish and enhance incident response capabilities and production recovery procedures.
• Define and enforce standards concerning environment lifecycle, configuration management, and secret management practices.
• Provide leadership and mentorship to a small team of platform engineers, including technical guidance, code reviews, and career development support.
• Remain actively involved in hands-on tasks including infrastructure code writing, pipeline building, and service instrumentation.
• Coordinate cross-functional efforts with product and engineering groups to balance platform reliability with delivery speed.
• Monitor and report on platform health metrics such as deployment frequency, failure rates, and recovery timelines.
• Create tools and documentation to empower engineers for self-service provisioning and management of development environments.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• At least five years experience in platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering with direct responsibility for production systems.
• Practical expertise with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform to manage multi-environment cloud infrastructure.
• Proven ability to design and maintain CI/CD pipelines, preferably with Azure DevOps or a similar platform.
• Experience providing technical leadership, mentoring, and hands-on engineering within a team.
• Strong communication skills capable of clarifying platform tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Skills

• Knowledge of AWS cloud infrastructure and container orchestration technologies, such as Kubernetes, including lightweight distributions like k3s for on-premises use.
• Experience with observability platforms like the Grafana stack, including Loki, for comprehensive metrics and logging.
• Background in leading production incident management and conducting root cause analyses.
• Familiarity with environment lifecycle management, specifically configuration and secret handling across various stages.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI-powered coding assistants and agentic workflows, with a discerning understanding of their effective applications.
• Domain knowledge in mining, industrial operations, or other regulated, complex systems is advantageous but not mandatory.

Education & Eligibility

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or comparable experience.
• Authorization to work in Australia is required.
• Based in Brisbane, able to work in a hybrid setup with 2 days onsite weekly.

Work Conditions & Benefits

• Competitive base salary along with superannuation benefits.
• Option to work a 9-day fortnight schedule, providing a regular rostered day off every two weeks.
• Flexible hybrid work arrangement combining office presence and remote work.

Additional Information

This is a foundational leadership role establishing how platform engineering operates within Wenco for years ahead. The role offers broad technical exposure from cloud to on-premises systems along with substantial influence on team and platform standards. The position emphasizes hands-on involvement, cross-team collaboration, and high impact on operational processes.

Wenco is committed to fostering an inclusive workplace and is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The job description provides a general overview and is not an exhaustive list of duties or contractual terms. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Please ensure a current resume is submitted.