The hiring challenge – Platform Engineering Talent
A growing Australian technology company found that its success had outpaced its infrastructure. Deployments were slow, reliability was becoming a recurring problem, and engineering teams were spending too much time on plumbing instead of product. The company needed platform engineering talent to build the internal platforms, tooling and paved roads that would let its developers ship quickly and safely. The difficulty was that platform engineering is one of the harder areas to hire well: the talent pool is small relative to demand, job titles are inconsistent across the market, and it is easy to mistake someone who lists the right tools for someone who has genuinely run them in production under load.
The role requirements
The brief called for engineers who think like product builders serving internal customers, not just ticket operators. Depending on the seniority and shape of the team, requirements for a platform search typically include:
- Strong cloud experience across AWS, Azure or GCP
- Container orchestration with Kubernetes and Docker, and infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar
- CI/CD pipeline design and maintenance, and observability with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana or Datadog
- A reliability mindset: SLOs, error budgets, incident response and sensible on-call design
- The judgement to know when to build versus buy, and how to reduce toil for other engineers
- Experience appropriate to the company’s stage — a generalist who can stand things up end to end, or a specialist who can operate at scale within governance
The search strategy
Big Wave Digital started by understanding what the company was actually building, the maturity of its current infrastructure, and what “good” looked like in the role. Because the best platform engineers are rarely on the open market, the search drew on established networks across the Australian platform, cloud and DevOps community rather than relying on adverts. A key part of the work was cutting through inconsistent titles — a “DevOps Engineer” at one company is a “Platform Engineer” at another — to focus on demonstrated operational depth rather than keywords on a CV. The result was a focused shortlist of engineers matched to both the technical requirements and the team’s stage.
The candidate market
Demand for platform talent in Australia is strong, particularly across Sydney’s cloud-native companies, fintechs and SaaS platforms, and the supply of genuinely experienced people is tight. Remote and hybrid arrangements have widened the pool nationally, which helps, but it also means employers are competing for the same people across the whole country. Strong platform engineers tend to have options, so a clear process and a compelling description of the technical challenge matter as much as compensation.
The outcome
Big Wave Digital ran a focused search and presented a shortlist of platform engineers matched to the company’s stage and stack. The company was able to hire talent suited to its environment — people who could treat infrastructure as a product and make the secure path the easy path for other engineers. As with most platform hires, the value showed in steadier delivery and fewer late-night reliability problems over the following months, rather than in any single moment.
Lessons for employers
For employers hiring platform talent, filtering on job title alone is unreliable — the same work hides behind several different labels. Technical screening needs to test for real operational depth, not just tool familiarity, because someone can list Kubernetes and Terraform and still lack the experience to run them safely at scale. The strongest platform engineers think like product builders for internal customers, so screening for that mindset matters. And because the best people are passive and in demand, a fast, well-run process protects the search.
Frequently asked questions
What is platform engineering recruitment?
It is the specialist hiring of engineers who build and run the internal platforms, cloud infrastructure and delivery tooling that product teams depend on — including platform engineers, DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers and cloud engineers.
Why is platform engineering talent hard to hire?
The talent pool is small relative to demand, job titles are inconsistent across companies, and it is easy to mistake tool familiarity for real operational depth. Screening properly takes someone who understands the difference between DevOps, SRE and platform engineering.
What technologies does Big Wave Digital recruit for in platform roles?
Commonly AWS, Azure and GCP, Kubernetes and Docker, Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana and Datadog.
Does Big Wave Digital recruit platform engineers outside Sydney?
Yes. Big Wave Digital is based in Sydney and recruits across Australia, including remote and hybrid platform roles nationally.
Related services
- Platform Engineering Recruitment Australia
- Software Engineering Recruitment
- Big Wave Digital Success Stories
- About Keiran Hathorn
- Start a conversation with Big Wave Digital
Follow Big Wave Digital on LinkedIn for more on platform engineering talent.
When it comes to platform engineering talent, Big Wave Digital brings specialist Australian market knowledge. Getting platform engineering talent right is the difference between a good hire and a great one. Our team works on platform engineering talent every day across Sydney and the wider Australian tech market. If platform engineering talent is on your agenda, talk to a specialist who lives in this space. When it comes to platform engineering talent, Big Wave Digital brings specialist Australian market knowledge. Getting platform engineering talent right is the difference between a good hire and a great one.
When it comes to platform engineering talent, Big Wave Digital brings specialist Australian market knowledge. Getting platform engineering talent right is the difference between a good hire and a great one.
