Principal Cloud Engineer - Melbourne

Job summary

We are establishing a high-calibre, merit-based panel of Principal Cloud Engineers to lead major cloud adoption, migration, and modernisation programs across federal and state government agencies and essential national utilities (energy, water, transport, telecommunications).

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver enterprise landing zones and foundation platforms (AWS Control Tower / Organizations or Azure Enterprise-Scale Landing Zones) with security, governance, and scalability built in from the start.
• Lead the establishment of new cloud environments for agencies or business units, creating standardised, reusable patterns for identity, networking, hierarchy, and core services.
• Drive large-scale application modernisation and workload migration programs, including re-platforming, re-architecting, and optimising complex estates for cloud-native outcomes.
• Design and implement advanced networking solutions (AWS VPCs, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect OR Azure Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute, Private Endpoints, Azure Firewall) using defence-in-depth and segmentation principles.
• Champion enterprise-grade Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform strongly preferred, CloudFormation or Bicep) with GitOps pipelines and policy-as-code enforcement.
• Build and enforce robust cloud governance frameworks: hierarchy structures, tagging standards, cost controls, least-privilege access models, and automated guardrails.
• Embed security best practices end-to-end: encryption everywhere, secrets management, WAF, continuous compliance, and native threat detection services.
• Provide authoritative guidance on cloud operating models, DevSecOps maturity, and Well-Architected Framework alignment for government and utility-scale environments.

Job description