Senior Cloud Platform Engineer

About the role

The Q-CTRL Infrastructure team is part of the backbone of our software platform and hardware initiatives. Guided by our vision to make the right way the easy way, our mission is to build reliable, secure and maintainable infrastructure that enables Q-CTRL to scale its revolutionary quantum technology.

As a Cloud Platform Engineer, you will play a critical role supporting our Kubernetes-based SaaS platform, our growing hardware division and embedded deployments. You will help build infrastructure across diverse workloads, ensuring our end-to-end processes are fully code-driven, automated and optimized to keep operational complexity low.

Based in our Santa Monica office, you will collaborate closely with the bulk of our team located in Sydney, Australia. Joining an established team that offers strong support and values an open culture, you will drive continuous improvement by leveraging Infrastructure as Code and establishing golden paths that empower engineering teams to ship safely and autonomously.

What you’ll be doing:

• Providing in-hours support for US-based research and engineering teams, while authoring clear technical proposals, ADRs and documentation to drive asynchronous alignment with our Sydney team.
• Getting up to speed on our software stack, integrating insights from your experience into our platform architecture, updating code where needed and driving tech choices to hit our platform goals.
• Ensuring Q-CTRL stays current with cloud best practices, advocating for a strong DevOps culture and actively contributing to innovation across our engineering workflows.
• Developing toolchain support including CI/CD pipelines, operators such as those for GitOps, ephemeral environments, vulnerability scanning and automated Infrastructure as Code deployment tooling.
• Helping ensure our applications are scalable, highly available, cloud-agnostic and accessible via Zero Trust networking across public clouds as well as embedded client infrastructure.

Ideally you’ll have:

• 5+ years of industry experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering or equivalent.
• Experience running Kubernetes in production and deep familiarity with everything needed to provision production-grade clusters.
• Expert knowledge of public clouds using Infrastructure as Code to build intuitive, self-service golden paths that enable engineering teams to ship safely and autonomously.
• Hands-on experience with a variety of Linux distributions and strong system-level troubleshooting skills.
• Proficiency in software development (primarily Go and Python) with the ability to quickly understand application behavior from codebases with minimal context.
• A pragmatic approach to system design that balances curiosity with maintainability, choosing simple, sustainable patterns that keep long-term operational debt low.

It would be fantastic if you have these skills/experience but not essential:

• Relevant Kubernetes certifications such as CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
• Relevant public cloud certifications such as AWS SAA/SAP or GCP ACE/PCA.
• Familiarity with the CNCF and its various projects.
• Experience using GitOps tools such as Argo CD or Flux CD.