About Fat Zebra
At Fat Zebra, we simplify payments so merchants and platforms can scale with confidence. Our flexible,
secure, and scalable payments platform supports over 100,000 merchants of all sizes across Australia. We help our customers navigate the complexities of the payments platform, enabling them to focus on what matters most: growing their business.
About the Role
A Senior Platform Engineer at Fat Zebra is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable and reliable infrastructure that supports engineering and operations across the organisation. You’ll lead efforts in automation, CI/CD pipeline development, cloud infrastructure, and system observability — collaborating closely with engineering and security to ensure the platform is stable, secure, and scalable. We’re looking for someone who takes pride in solving problems once — building systems, tooling, and guardrails that mean teams don’t keep hitting the same walls. This role requires deep technical expertise, the ability to drive architectural decisions, and a genuine commitment to optimising both platform performance and developer experience.
Key Responsibilities
As a Senior Platform Engineer at Fat Zebra, specific areas of responsibility include:
- Manage the infrastructure on which Fat Zebra services run, including AWS and on-premise services
- Design, build, and maintain production infrastructure managed through Terraform, with a focus on stability, security, and scalability
- Support existing platform engineering services, keeping them current and operating as expected
- Identify and deliver new solutions that help engineering teams ship better software faster
- Ship infrastructure changes safely — staged rollouts, change management, runbooks, and rollback plans are part of your standard practice
- Build automation and tooling that replaces manual, repetitive work with reliable, repeatable systems
- Partner with engineering delivery teams to work through platform issues and translate their needs into solutions
- Apply security, resource, and reliability considerations to every problem — solutions need to work within those constraints, not around them
- Write and maintain tests for infrastructure — changes go through the same rigour as application code
- bute to incident response, and share context generously so the whole squad gets better.
How You Know You Will Succeed
- You demonstrate leadership within the platform engineering team — showing others how to build solutions that are scalable, secure, and stable. You’re the person who sets the standard for how infrastructure changes get made, not just the person making them.
- You communicate effectively with engineering delivery teams. You can sit with a team that’s struggling, understand what they actually need, and translate that back into something platform engineering can deliver. When you’ve built something useful, you go out and show teams how to use it — you’re comfortable presenting and can make infrastructure feel relevant and approachable to people who don’t work on it every day.
- You’d rather fix the underlying cause than add another work around. You document and automate because you know future-you (and your teammates) will thank you. You treat a production change with the same care on a Friday as on a Monday. When something breaks, you’re calm and methodical — and you can chase a problem from a browser network tab all the way down through load balancers, services, and VPC routing without stopping at the layer you own.
About You
To hit the ground running you will need to leverage your capability in the following areas;
Required skills:
- Solid, hands-on AWS experience — you know the services, the gotchas, and how to design for reliability and cost
- Production-scale Terraform — you’ve written and maintained it, not just applied it
- Proficiency in at least one programming language (Python, Go, Ruby, or similar) — you write code to solve problems, not just scripts to paper over them
- A track record of safe infrastructure operations and incident response
- Experience with testing and automation as a core part of how you work
Nice to have:
- Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure tooling
- A background advocating for infrastructure investment and translating technical risk to non-technical stakeholders
