Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

As Principal AI Platform Engineer youll be the key architect and technical owner of the platform that powers Nearmap AI innovation. Youll lead a team of 3 to 4 mid-level and senior engineers set the technical vision for our ML infrastructure and drive its evolution. 

This is a leadership role for a seasoned engineer who thinks in systems. Nearmap captures and processes aerial imagery at a scale that breaks most infrastructure: thousands of EKS nodes running batch inference distributed GPU training across two clouds real-time model endpoints behind customer products and LLM and agentic systems moving from prototype into production. You wont only build on that platform. Youll define what it becomes. 

Reporting to the Director AICV Platform Engineering your customers are the AICV product teams: AI Model R&D Computer Vision Insurance Data Science Agentic AI and AI Map Data. Your objective is a robust scalable efficient ecosystem that acts as a force multiplier for the whole AI organisation. 

To be clear about the boundary: this is a platform role not an application role. You build what those teams build on not the customer-facing products themselves. 

Day to day youll: 

• Define and own the technical roadmap for core ML infrastructure: workflow orchestration on Kubernetes distributed training batch inference at thousands-of-nodes scale real-time serving on Ray and LLMOps. 

• Make the critical design calls and evaluate new technologies from orchestrators and serving frameworks to vector databases. 

• Lead and mentor a team of 3 to 4 mid-level and senior ML systems engineers and own technical hiring for the platform team. 

• Spearhead the highest-risk work yourself: multi-cloud GPU capacity strategy foundational platform components and the observability stack. 

• Write production Python for the hardest parts of the shared platform and prototype new capabilities before the team commits to them. 

• Establish and champion MLOps and AIOps best practice across the organisation covering automation infrastructure as code CI/CD and security through the AI lifecycle. 

• Partner with Data Science and ML Engineering teams turning their challenges into an actionable platform roadmap. 

• Own service level objectives and GPU cost efficiency across AWS and GCP lead major incident response and build detection for the ways production ML fails quietly. 

Qualifications :

• 10 years in software engineering with at least 4 years focused on building and operating large-scale infrastructure platform engineering or distributed systems in production. 

• Proven experience leading technical projects and mentoring or managing a team of engineers. 

• Deep production-level expertise designing building and operating systems on Kubernetes including GPU scheduling. 

• Expert-level Python and the distributed systems judgment to reason clearly about failure backpressure and cost at scale. 

• Hands-on experience building and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP with infrastructure as code (Terraform Pulumi or similar). 

• Strong practical grounding in modern software development practice: Git CI/CD monitoring alerting and automated testing. 

• Bachelors or Masters degree in computer science engineering or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience. 

Highly desirable 

• Workflow orchestration frameworks such as Argo Workflows Kubeflow Pipelines Flyte or Ray and KubeRay. 

• Designing and managing large-scale GPU-intensive ML workloads and GPU capacity strategy across more than one cloud. 

• Deep familiarity with the MLOps and LLMOps ecosystem: model registries feature stores serving frameworks vector databases and RAG systems. 

• Advanced Kubernetes concepts including custom operators and multi-cluster networking. 

• Petabyte-scale data pipelines or geospatial and computer vision workloads. 

• A track record of contributing to open-source projects in the cloud-native or MLOps space. 

Additional Information :

Some of our benefits

Nearmap takes a holistic approach to our employees emotional physical and financial wellness. Some of our current benefits include:

• Quarterly wellbeing day off - Four additional days off a year as your YOU days
• Access to LinkedIn Learning
• Team Hackathons and Pitch-fests
• Wellbeing and technology allowance
• Annual flu vaccinations
• Nearmap subscription (of course!)
• Stocked kitchen with access to all the sustenance you need
• In-office Lunch every Tuesday and Thursday at our Sydney CBD office
• Showers available for anyone cycling to work or lunchtime gym-goers!

Working at Nearmap

We move fast and work smart; often wearing multiple hats. We adapted to remote working with ease and are continually looking at ways to improve. Were proud of our inclusive supportive culture and maintain a safe environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be themselves.

If you can see yourself working at Nearmap and feel you have the right level of experience we invite you to get in touch. 

Watch our culture video below to find out more about what a day in the life at Nearmap looks like.

Thanks but we got this! Nearmap does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies and search firms. Please do not email or send unsolicited resumes to any Nearmap employee location or address. Nearmap is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Some of our benefits:

Nearmap takes a holistic approach to our employees emotional physical and financial wellness. Some of our current benefits include:

• Quarterly wellbeing day off - Four additional days off annually for your YOU Days
• Wellbeing and technology allowance
• Annual flu vaccinations
• Hybrid flexibility for this role
• Nearmap subscription (of course!)
• Stocked kitchen with access to all the snacks you need
• In-office lunch every Tuesday and Thursday at our Sydney CBD office
• Showers available for anyone cycling to work or lunchtime gym-goers!

Why youll love working at Nearmap:

We move fast and work smart; often wearing multiple hats. Were proud of our inclusive supportive culture and maintain a safe environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be themselves.

Learn More About The Work We Do

YouTube Page

LinkedIn Page

Thanks but we got this! Nearmap does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies and search firms. Please do not email or send unsolicited resumes to any Nearmap employee location or address. Nearmap is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time