Snr Platform Engineer

HE sector is seeking an experienced Senior Platform Engineer with excellent Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) expertise to support and evolve the university's cloud platform services. This role is critical in enabling secure, scalable, and resilient platforms for teaching, learning, research, and administrative systems. You will work closely with academic researchers, application teams, and central IT to deliver reliable cloud platforms that support student systems, research workloads, and institutional data, while ensuring compliance with higher education security and governance standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain OCI-based cloud platforms supporting HE systems, research computing, and student-facing services.
• Architect and manage OCI networking including VCNs, subnets, DRGs, Load Balancers, VPN/FastConnect, and network security controls.
• Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform to ensure consistency, repeatability, and auditability.
• Enable platforms for research workloads, including data-intensive and high-performance computing use cases (where applicable).
• Collaborate with academic faculties, research groups, and IT teams to deliver fit-for-purpose cloud solutions.
• Implement and enforce cloud security, governance, and compliance, including IAM, compartment design, data protection, and tagging standards.
• Ops and CI/CD practices to enable application development teams across the university.
• Monitor platform performance, availability, and costs, ensuring effective cost control and budget transparency.
• Provide advanced troubleshooting and incident support for critical university systems.
• Document platform standards, architectures, and operational procedures.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to skills development within the university IT team.
• Participate in On-Call support and planned maintenance activities as required.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Minimum 5+ years of proven industry experience in Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in production environments.
• Solid experience with:
  • OCI Compute, Storage (Block, Object, File), and Networking
  • OCI IAM, Compartments, Policies, Security Lists, and NSGs
• Strong proficiency in GITLAB & Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Strong Linux systems administration experience.
• Oracle Database awareness / experience.
• Experience with container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes (OCI OKE desirable).
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tooling.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to support diverse stakeholders, including academic and administrative users.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Desirable / Nice to Have

• OCI certifications (e.g., OCI Architect Professional).
• Experience working in a higher education or public sector environment.
• Exposure to research computing, data platforms, or HPC workloads.
• Knowledge of security, privacy, and compliance frameworks relevant to universities.
• Experience with hybrid or multi-cloud environments.