Platform Engineer (DevSecOps)

• 1-year contract, renewable
• Hybrid work arrangement
• Government project

About the Role

CStack and Airbase are Whole-of-Government (WoG) runtime platforms that provide a secure,multi-tenant Kubernetes and AWS foundation for application teams.

We are building an internal developer platform, similar in spirit to products like Vercel or Railway, but tailored for government workloads and compliance requirements. Our goal is to allow teams to deploy, operate, and scale applications with minimal platform-specific knowledge, while inheriting secure defaults, observability, and reliability out of the box.

We are looking for Platform Engineers with strong software engineering skills who can designand build platform abstractions and actively contribute to this developer portal, alongside backend platform services.

This role combines platform product thinking with production engineering discipline. It is not a CI/CD-only or cloud-operations-only role.

What You Will Do

Platform & Abstraction Design (Primary Focus)

• Design and build developer-facing abstractions over AWS and Kubernetes that hide infrastructure complexity.
• Build platform services, APIs, CLIs, controllers, or operators that enable simple deployment workflows similar to modern PaaS platforms.
• Define opinionated defaults for networking, security, scaling, and reliability, while allowing controlled extensibility.
• Treat platform components as long-lived products with clear interfaces, documentation, and adoption metrics.

Software Engineering

• Write production-grade code primarily in:
• Go or Python for platform services, automation, and Kubernetes integrations.
• TypeScript for contributing to the internal developer portal and related APIs.
• Apply strong software engineering fundamentals:
• API and interface design
• Versioning and backward compatibility
• Error handling and failure modes
• Testing and maintainability
• Design code with the expectation that other engineers and tenant teams build on top of it.

Internal Developer Portal (Custom-Built)

• Contribute features and improvements to a custom internal developer portal built with TypeScript and NextJS.
• Design workflows, forms, and APIs that enable self-service provisioning, deployment, and observability.
• Ensure the portal reflects platform standards, guardrails, and golden paths.
• Collaborate closely with backend platform components to deliver a cohesive developer experience.

CI/CD, GitOps & Deployment Workflows

• Design and maintain GitOps-based deployment workflows using ArgoCD.
• Build reusable CI/CD abstractions using GitLab CI/CD for build, test, and promotion workflows.
• Integrate CI pipelines with ArgoCD for safe, auditable, and repeatable deployments.
• Support deployment strategies such as canary and blue-green deployments to minimise downtime.
• Reduce deployment friction for tenants by standardising workflows and removing the need fordeep CI/CD or Kubernetes expertise.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Design and maintain reusable Terraform modules that encode platform standards and guardrails.
• Abstract AWS and Kubernetes primitives behind stable, versioned interfaces.
• Ensure infrastructure changes are auditable, repeatable, and safe for multi-tenant usage.

Databases and Data Protection

• Design platform-level patterns for database provisioning and operations.
• Support and validate backup and restore strategies, including automated backups, snapshot management, and recovery testing.
• Work with tenants to ensure data durability, recoverability, and minimal downtime during incidents.

Observability and Monitoring

• Build platform-level observability capabilities using Elastic Cloud for logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting.
• Integrate Prometheus for metrics scraping and collection, with metrics surfaced via Elastic.
• Apply the Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) as a core observability principle.
• Provide standard dashboards, alerts, and SLOs that tenants inherit by default.

Production Support and Incident Management

• Participate in incident response for platform components.
• Design platform features that improve debuggability, enable safe rollbacks, and reduce MTTR.
• Drive post-incident improvements by evolving platform design rather than relying on manual processes.

Performance, Optimisation, and Reliability

• Design platform components for scalability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Identify and address bottlenecks at the platform layer.
• Continuously improve reliability through automation, better defaults, and guardrails.

Tenant Engagement, Developer Experience & Knowledge Sharing

• Engage tenant teams as a technical advisor on platform usage and best practices.
• Produce clear documentation, diagrams, runbooks, and examples that improve onboarding and adoption.
• Gather feedback from tenants and iterate on platform capabilities based on real usage.

Continuous Learning

• Stay current with developments in AWS, Kubernetes, GitOps, and the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Evaluate new tools and patterns relevant to internal developer platforms and PaaS-style workflows.
• Share learnings within the team and contribute to continuous improvement.

Required Skills and Experience

• Strong hands-on experience with:
• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• GitLab CI/CD
• ArgoCD
• Elastic Cloud (logs, traces, dashboards, alerting)
• Prometheus (metrics scraping and collection)
• Strong programming skills in Go or Python.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript, with a willingness to contribute to a NextJS codebase.
• Proven experience building tooling, services, or abstractions that other engineers depend on.
• Experience supporting production systems, including incident response.
• Experience with databases, including backup, restore, and recovery considerations.
• Ability to communicate clearly with tenant teams and internal stakeholders.

Nice to Have (Bonus)

• Strong experience with TypeScript, React, or NextJS.
• Experience building custom Internal Developer Portals or self-service platforms.
• Experience building Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks.
• Familiarity with canary, blue-green, or other progressive delivery techniques.
• Experience with SLOs and reliability engineering practices.

Who This Role Is For

• Engineers that are excited by building internal platforms similar to Vercel or Railway.
• Builders who enjoy turning complex infrastructure into simple developer workflows.
• Engineers who want to work across backend platform services, GitOps workflows, andfrontend developer experience.

Who This Role Is Not For

• Engineers focused purely on operations or support.
• CI/CD or infrastructure-only specialists without software ownership.
• Roles with minimal coding or long-term platform responsibility.