Engineer – Reliability & Observability
Internal role title – Engineer
We’re the airline that dares to be different, bold, down-to-earth and built around giving our guests real choice. Safety is our backbone, service is our heartbeat, and our people are our superpower.
We’re vibrant, authentic and unapologetically human. Here, you can bring your whole self, your Virgin Flair and your ambition to a team that champions individuality, innovation and a whole lot of heart. If you're excited by meaningful work, real opportunities to grow, and a culture where you can genuinely make a difference, you'll feel right at home with us.
Our ambition is to build the airline people love, and technology is central to making that happen. We're building a new Platform Engineering capability that will make software delivery simpler, faster and more secure across the enterprise. If you're passionate about reliability engineering, observability and creating resilient platforms that empower engineering teams, we'd love to hear from you.
What you'll be doing…
As an Engineer - Reliability and Observability, you'll build and evolve reusable platform capabilities that help product teams understand, operate and improve their services. You'll make high-quality telemetry, service health and operational readiness part of the standard delivery path, reducing manual effort and the specialist knowledge required to run software reliably.
Working with platform, cloud, cybersecurity, architecture and product engineering teams, you'll treat reliability and observability as products. You'll understand developer needs, provide sensible defaults and self-service capabilities, and improve them using adoption, reliability and developer experience data. Product teams will remain accountable for their applications; your role is to give them the capabilities and guardrails to exercise that ownership effectively.
- Create paved roads for metrics, logs, traces, alerting and service health, integrated into delivery pipelines and platform templates.
- Provide self-service templates, modules, APIs and automation that make services easy to instrument and operate without creating a central ticket queue.
- Establish standards and sensible defaults for telemetry, dashboards and alerts, with controlled extension paths for justified product needs.
- Partner with product teams to define meaningful service level indicators and objectives, use error budgets, and connect technical health to customer and operational outcomes.
- Engineer for resilience, capacity, recovery and graceful failure using automation, testing and evidence from production.
- Support major incident diagnosis and blameless reviews, then turn recurring lessons into improvements to shared capabilities and golden paths.
- Manage observability data, access, retention and cost responsibly, meeting cybersecurity, privacy and regulatory requirements.
- Research developer needs, document and demonstrate the platform's capabilities, and use feedback to shape a prioritised product backlog.
- Measure success through adoption and outcomes such as time to instrument a service, alert quality, availability, detection and recovery time, developer effort and platform cost.
You'll be great in this role if you…
You'll bring strong software and automation engineering skills, experience with modern cloud platforms, and a practical understanding of reliability in distributed systems. You enjoy solving complex problems and building reusable capabilities that other engineers choose to adopt.
- Experience in platform engineering, site reliability engineering, cloud engineering or a similar software-focused engineering role.
- Experience designing and operating observability capabilities across metrics, logs and distributed traces.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes and modern distributed systems.
- Practical experience with OpenTelemetry and observability technologies such as Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk or similar.
- Strong automation skills using a modern programming or scripting language, Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices.
- Practical knowledge of service level indicators and objectives, error budgets, incident management and operational readiness.
- Experience building reusable, self-service capabilities for engineers, supported by clear documentation and usable defaults.
- Strong troubleshooting and systems-thinking skills across applications, cloud infrastructure, networks and distributed systems.
- A product mindset and the ability to work with engineers, cybersecurity and operations teams to turn diverse needs into scalable platform capabilities.
Experience with Amazon EKS, developer portals, policy as code, resilience or chaos testing, observability cost management, or safety-conscious and regulated environments would be highly regarded.
We're committed to looking after you, with some of the best benefits and conditions in the industry – including (but not limited to):
- Discounted flights for you and your loved ones (including $1000 worth of travel credits per year)
- A flexible, hybrid work style. Work from home or the office, adapt your location to suit your style and needs
- Discounts on travel insurance, lounge membership, car hire, accommodation, and experiences worldwide
- Retail, technology, wellness, and lifestyle discounts.
- One of Brisbane’s most admired head office locations, with South Bank train station, a supermarket, pharmacy, and lunch options downstairs plus a 5-minute walk to the Busway, a rooftop restaurant and onsite gym (with a low membership fee) and South Bank Parklands just across the road
- Free counselling and access to a wellbeing app to support your physical, mental, social, and financial health
- 'Dress for Your Day' – enjoy the freedom to wear whatever makes you feel great for the type of work you do and the day you have ahead of you.
When everyone is included, everyone wins…
We're all individuals. And we love that. That's why we encourage applications from Indigenous Australians, people with disability, those from diverse cultural backgrounds, our friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who wants to join our family.
Ready to apply? We're ready to hear from you. .
