The AKQA Managed Services team provides customer experience platform management and cloud environment support solutions, DevOps engineering, and consulting services that support our clients' ecommerce platforms and associated business operations. There is now an exciting opportunity to join the AKQA Managed Services team and be an integral part in continuing to expand their core services and solutions.

Located in Auckland or Wellington, the Senior Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and evolving internal developer platforms that power some of Australia and New Zealand's most visited digital experiences. You will build platforms and tools that enable development teams to efficiently build, test, and deploy scalable, cloud-based solutions for our clients across available cloud platforms, including but not limited to Azure, AWS, and GCP. You will contribute to a wider team focused on creating self-service capabilities, reducing cognitive load on developers, and improving developer experience through platform automation and standardisation, while ensuring our client platforms maintain the highest levels of performance, security, and reliability.

You are an excellent technologist who possesses an understanding of software engineering principles, application development and deployment pipelines, physical infrastructure, internet hosting services, and data security configuration and management of public cloud platforms. You have a continuous improvement mindset that extends across the design to development to production lifecycle, with a passion for automation, security and strong problem-solving skills. You will support development teams, customer platforms, while championing the DevOps culture through knowledge transfer, continuous learning & training and technical certification support.

Key Responsibilities 

• Design and build self-service developer platforms and tools that improve productivity and reliability 
• Develop reusable infrastructure modules and blueprints using Terraform and other IaC tools 
• Create and maintain platform documentation, tutorials, and internal developer portals 
• Implement observability and metrics to measure platform effectiveness and developer experience 
• Provide technical guidance and support to development and operations support teams using the platform 
• Design and implement automated testing capabilities within the platform 
• Perform root cause analysis for platform and application issues 
• Contribute to platform architecture decisions and technical standards 
• Be the Managed Services technical representative in platform solution workshops and discussions  
• Ensure security and compliance through built-in controls and best practices 
• Build strong relationships with development teams to understand their needs and pain points 
• Maintain positive feedback and relationships with peers and key stakeholders across clients, studios and WPP OpCo’s. 
• Participate in 24x7 service desk roster and occasional operations activities supporting key client platforms across the region 

 
Expectation from an ideal candidate 

• 3-5 years' experience in platform engineering, site reliability engineering, or similar roles 
• Strong experience with major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and infrastructure as code (Terraform) 
• Experience building developer tools, CLI applications, and automation frameworks 
• Knowledge of container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes) and cloud-native architectures 
• Experience with GitOps practices and modern CI/CD approaches 
• Proficiency with enterprise development tools including Git, Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, New Relic, and Cloudflare 
• Strong scripting capabilities in PowerShell, Bash, and other automation languages 
• Understanding of developer experience principles and metrics 
• Ability to communicate technical solutions, problems and/or descriptions, including context to a business audience. 
• Self-motivated with a focus on measuring and improving platform outcomes