Deakin is seeking a Principal, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering to provide specialist technical leadership across our cloud environments, ensuring our infrastructure is resilient, scalable and designed to support the future of digital, AI and data-enabled services.

• Based at either our Melbourne Burwood or Geelong Waterfront Campus, hybrid work available 
• Fulltime and continuing
• HEW 10 $147,757 + 17% Superannuation

Why work with us?

At Deakin University, you’ll find more than a job - you’ll find a community and a way of working that supports you to do your best work. Across our campuses in Geelong, Melbourne and regional Victoria, we offer an environment designed to help you thrive, with on-site childcare, gyms, medical centres, cafés, accessible public transport and convenient parking.

We support flexible and hybrid working, generous leave provisions - including extended parental leave and the option to purchase additional leave - and a wide range of staff benefits and discounts. Combined with our strong focus on health, wellbeing and professional development, Deakin offers a supportive, inclusive culture where leaders are trusted, people are valued and careers can grow.

About the role

Deakin isn't just adopting AI – we're building it. With Deakin GEM now live and our AI Factory, a multi-disciplinary squad, accelerating capability across the institution, ambitious work is underway across multiple streams.

As Principal, Cloud Engineering Infrastructure you will be in a hands-on technical role, working with Data, Engineering and Product specialists to provide the high-performing, cost-efficient and secure environments that make our AI concepts a reality. You will also collaborate with peers in the wider Cloud Systems & Services team to embed shared best-practices for automated cloud infrastructure management. You will be the technical authority who defines and implements the scalable, production-grade cloud infrastructure that supports our GEM Generative AI solutions and agentic workflows on AWS. You should be comfortable delivering complex Infrastructure as Code deployments, establishing and managing effective enterprise-grade observability, and in making robust long-term architectural decisions.

You will:

• Collaborate with stakeholders to align technical roadmaps with business goals.
• Architect end-to-end cloud environments specifically optimized for AI/ML workloads.
• Write production-ready IaC (Terraform) for auto-scaling GPU and CPU clusters.
• Design CI/CD pipelines that automate the deployment of both infrastructure and ML models.
• Design and implement comprehensive observability and monitoring capabilities
• Optimize cloud spend through proactive monitoring and architectural refinements.

About you

You are a highly experienced cloud infrastructure engineering professional who thrives in complex enterprise environments.

You’ll bring:

• Expert-level AWS AI skills: Deep knowledge of Bedrock, Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, and EKS & ECS Fargate.
• Infrastructure as Code: High proficiency in Terraform and AWS CDK.
• Data Engineering: Experience RDS and with RAG vector databases.
• Security: Solid understanding of IAM roles, VPC security, and data resilience (encryption, backup, redundancy) at scale.
• Operations: Mastery of MLOps principles, including model monitoring and drift detection, as well as core platform metric observability.

For a copy of the position description, please see below:

PD - Principal, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering.pdf

To apply

Please submit your updated resume and a short cover letter outlining your skills and experience.

For a confidential discussion regarding this role, please contact Stephen Castellas – Director, Digital Infrastructure & Cloud Services via stephen.castellas@deakin.edu.au 

Applications close Sunday, 17 May 2026 at 11:55pm.

Are You Ready?

Deakin is a Victorian university with a global impact. We are an agile, dynamic, and innovative university committed to making a positive impact through our excellence in education, research and innovation and the contributions we make to the wider community.

We understand that our reputation has been built on the dedication and expertise of our staff and we offer a dynamic and diverse working environment with opportunities to grow and develop careers. We believe that a progressive, thriving culture will ensure that people choose to come, and stay at Deakin and contribute to our ongoing success.

We value diversity and aim to build an inclusive environment that champions, embraces and respects differences. We support and encourage applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and people of all abilities, cultures, sexual orientation, and genders.

Pre-employment safety and suitability checks: In accordance with the National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence, appointment to this role is subject to successful completion of relevant pre-employment checks, including Working With Children Checks and candidate gender-based violence declarations. 

Candidates may be asked to declare whether they have been investigated for an allegation of Gender‑based Violence, or determined to have engaged in conduct that constitutes Gender‑based Violence during the course of their previous employment, or otherwise in a legal process.  A declaration is not required from individuals who have experienced gender‑based violence.  A ‘Yes’ response does not automatically exclude a candidate from employment, and any information provided will be treated confidentially and considered only for relevance to the role and the University’s safety obligations.