Systems Development Engineer, Route 53

G'day! You've found an opportunity that could define your next chapter. Applicants must be Australian citizens and hold or be eligible to obtain an Australian Government Security Clearance with the ability to successfully complete an Organisational Suitability Assessment. More information regarding security clearances can be found at https://www.agsva.gov.au/. The Mission - Why This Program, Why Now? You're joining at the defining moment of one of the most significant technology programmes Australia has ever undertaken. This programme will build and operate the dedicated cloud giving Australia's national security community and its allies the capability to see more, share more, innovate and act faster than ever before. The architectural decisions being made now - how we structure networking, implement security controls, and automate at scale - will shape how Australia's national security community operates for the next decade. You won't be inheriting someone else's design choices. You'll be making them. Your Opportunity Picture yourself at the intersection of sovereign cloud innovation and one of the world's most critical DNS infrastructures. As a Systems Engineer within our Region Services team, you'll be redefining how AWS designs, builds, and operates cloud regions — enabling new infrastructure and services offerings that serve customers across every industry, from ambitious start-ups to the public sector organisations safeguarding our nation. Route 53 isn't just another DNS service — it's the nervous system of the internet operating across 50+ global locations with a 100% availability SLA. You'll be engineering latency-based routing, Private DNS architectures, Geo DNS solutions, and failover mechanisms that millions depend on without ever knowing your name. The distributed systems you'll build here are among the largest and most complex on the planet, and the challenges waiting for you are the kind that make exceptional engineers come alive. Whether you choose Melbourne or Sydney as your home base, you'll join a team of adaptable, passionate engineers who thrive on complexity and refuse to accept "good enough." Your technical expertise and development abilities will drive innovation that echoes far beyond a single service — you'll be shaping how Australia's sovereign cloud capability operates for a generation. Key job responsibilities - Support the refinement of system requirements, participate in the development and delivery of operability-related features such as system health monitoring, diagnostics, repair, and other self-healing automation - Develop or further existing application and system management tools and processes that reduce manual efforts and increase overall efficiency - Adapt and improve operations management systems and processes to accommodate rapid and increasing growth in systems and traffic - Participate in the design and execution of production acceptance tests and new hardware evaluations - Monitor the health of the fleet, automating system health, maintenance tasks, and reporting systems as needed - Participate in “on-call” rotations to resolve incidents occurring out-of-hours. A day in the life Your morning begins with a glance at the fleet health dashboard — built by you, refined by you, trusted by the team. Overnight, a self-healing automation you deployed last week detected and resolved a disk utilisation issue across twelve hosts without triggering a single page. You smile, note the metrics, and move on. Mid-morning, you're writing code. A new service is preparing for production acceptance, and you're developing the health monitoring and diagnostic tooling that will give the team visibility from day one. You design the checks to be comprehensive but efficient — catching real problems without generating noise. You write tests, validate against a staging environment, and open a pull request. After lunch, you tackle a scaling challenge. Traffic patterns have shifted, and one of your