Engineer – Cloud Platform and Kubernetes Runtime

Internal role title – Engineer

We’re the airline that dares to be different, bold, down-to-earth and built around giving our guests real choice. Safety is our backbone, service is our heartbeat, and our people are our superpower.

We’re vibrant, authentic and unapologetically human. Here, you can bring your whole self, your Virgin Flair and your ambition to a team that champions individuality, innovation and a whole lot of heart. If you're excited by meaningful work, real opportunities to grow, and a culture where you can genuinely make a difference, you'll feel right at home with us.

Our ambition is to build the airline people love, and technology is central to making that happen. We're building a new Platform Engineering capability that will make software delivery simpler, faster and more secure across the enterprise. If you're passionate about cloud platforms, automation and engineering excellence, we'd love to hear from you.

What you'll be doing…

As an Engineer - Cloud Platform and Kubernetes Runtime, you'll build and evolve the reusable capabilities that allow product teams to deploy and operate workloads safely on Amazon EKS. You'll turn cloud, Kubernetes, security and operational requirements into automated platform services, sensible defaults and golden paths that reduce cognitive load and manual effort.

Working with platform, cloud, cybersecurity, architecture and product engineering teams, you'll treat the runtime as a product. You'll understand developer needs, provide self-service capabilities and controlled extension paths, and improve the platform using adoption, reliability, security, cost and developer experience data. Product teams will remain accountable for their applications and workloads; your role is to give them the platform capabilities and guardrails to exercise that ownership effectively.

Create self-service APIs, templates and workflows for provisioning, deploying and operating workloads without creating a central ticket queue.
Codify the platform using Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, automated testing and delivery pipelines so environments are consistent, repeatable and auditable.
Build golden paths with secure defaults for identity, networking, secrets, observability, resilience and software supply chain controls, expressing standards and guardrails as code.
Automate Kubernetes and platform lifecycle management, including upgrades, patching, vulnerability remediation and dependency currency with minimal workload disruption.
Engineer for availability, recovery, capacity and graceful failure appropriate to an operationally critical airline environment.
Improve platform efficiency through workload isolation, capacity management and cost transparency, balancing resilience with responsible cloud consumption.
Research developer needs, document and demonstrate platform capabilities, and use feedback and usage data to shape a prioritised product backlog.
Measure success through adoption and outcomes such as time to first deployment, platform availability, change failure rate, remediation time, developer effort and unit cost.

You'll be great in this role if ….

You'll bring strong software and automation engineering skills, deep practical experience with AWS and Kubernetes, and a product mindset. You enjoy solving complex systems problems and building reusable platform capabilities that other engineers choose to adopt.

Experience engineering and operating Kubernetes platforms at scale, ideally Amazon EKS.
Strong hands-on experience with AWS networking, IAM, compute, storage and managed platform services.
Experience building production platforms using Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code technologies.
Strong automation skills using a modern programming or scripting language, CI/CD, GitOps, GitHub Actions and Helm, or equivalent technologies.
Strong understanding of Kubernetes architecture, workload scheduling, networking, security, tenancy and lifecycle management.
Experience creating reusable self-service capabilities, golden paths and standards expressed as code.
Practical knowledge of observability, service reliability, disaster recovery, incident management and operational readiness.
Strong troubleshooting and systems-thinking skills across applications, containers, networks and cloud infrastructure.

Experience with internal developer platforms, Kubernetes operators, policy as code, FinOps, software supply chain security, service mesh technologies, or safety-conscious and regulated environments would be highly regarded.

We're committed to looking after you, with some of the best benefits and conditions in the industry – including (but not limited to):

Discounted flights for you and your loved ones (including $1000 worth of travel credits per year)
A flexible, hybrid work style. Work from home or the office, adapt your location to suit your style and needs
Discounts on travel insurance, lounge membership, car hire, accommodation, and experiences worldwide
Retail, technology, wellness, and lifestyle discounts.
One of Brisbane’s most admired head office locations, with South Bank train station, a supermarket, pharmacy, and lunch options downstairs plus a 5-minute walk to the Busway, a rooftop restaurant and onsite gym (with a low membership fee) and South Bank Parklands just across the road
Free counselling and access to a wellbeing app to support your physical, mental, social, and financial health
'Dress for Your Day' – enjoy the freedom to wear whatever makes you feel great for the type of work you do and the day you have ahead of you.

When everyone is included, everyone wins…

We're all individuals. And we love that. That's why we encourage applications from Indigenous Australians, people with disability, those from diverse cultural backgrounds, our friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who wants to join our family.

Ready to apply? We're ready to hear from you. Apply now.