What the role is all about:
We're seeking a Staff Engineer - EDGE Platform who will play a pivotal role in shaping and scaling REA's edge security and content delivery capabilities. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud, networking and security, with a strong focus on building resilient, reusable and well-governed edge platform capabilities for teams across REA.
You'll help define and evolve our EDGE platform strategy across CDN, WAF, bot management, DNS and traffic management, while applying platform thinking to create paved-road solutions that are secure, scalable and simple for product and engineering teams to adopt. You'll combine deep technical expertise with operational discipline, leveraging automation, observability and incident response practices to improve reliability and customer outcomes.
This is your chance to work on impactful projects that directly influence availability, performance and security for customer-facing experiences at scale. You'll work with modern tooling and collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, security and product teams in a large, complex technology environment.
While no two days are likely to be the same, your typical responsibilities will include:
- Set technical direction for the EDGE platform across CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, DNS and traffic management, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable and aligned to business priorities.
- Lead the design and evolution of platform capabilities using Akamai and Kasada, making sound architectural decisions that balance security, reliability, performance and developer experience.
- Define and drive reusable platform patterns using Terraform, with strong platform thinking that enables self-service, consistency, governance and safe adoption across engineering teams.
- Work across AWS, networking, CDN and edge security domains to solve complex end-to-end problems and raise the technical maturity of internet-facing systems.
- Partner closely with product, platform, security and development teams to influence roadmaps, shape designs early and ensure edge capabilities are built as strategic platform services rather than one-off solutions.
- Improve operational excellence through PagerDuty, incident leadership, runbooks, on-call practices, service readiness reviews and clear ownership models.
- Define technical standards, guardrails and engineering best practices for the EDGE domain, and ensure they are adopted effectively across teams.
- Own and drive meaningful technology outcomes through OKRs, architecture direction and measurable improvements in security, reliability, performance and platform adoption.
- Mentor engineers, provide technical leadership across team boundaries and help grow a strong engineering culture centred on accountability, ownership and continuous improvement.
Who we're looking for:
- 9+ years experience in cloud platform, SRE, network and edge engineering roles, including strong hands-on delivery and technical leadership in production environments.
- Deep expertise in CDN and edge technologies, ideally including Akamai for CDN, WAF and DDoS protection, with the ability to make sound architectural and operational trade-offs.
- Strong experience with bot management platforms such as Kasada, or similar capabilities used to detect and mitigate automated abuse at scale.
- Strong depth in AWS and a broad understanding of networking, DNS, TLS, traffic routing and internet-facing architectures, with the ability to reason across the full request path.
- Advanced proficiency in Terraform and infrastructure as code, including designing reusable modules, standards, abstractions and governance mechanisms for wider engineering adoption.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and/or Go, with experience building internal tooling, automation and platform integrations used by multiple teams.
- Proven ability to solve ambiguous, high-impact technical problems across distributed systems and drive outcomes that improve security, reliability, performance and developer experience.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with engineers, product, security and leadership stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds.
- A high degree of accountability and ownership, including experience shaping or owning OKRs, driving execution and being responsible for measurable platform outcomes.
Bonus Points for:
- Experience designing internal platform capabilities that improve developer experience and adoption through self-service patterns.
- Exposure to edge security policy management, rate limiting, API protection or zero trust patterns.
- Experience in high-scale internet platforms where performance, availability and abuse prevention are critical.
- Familiarity with compliance, governance or risk controls in cloud and edge environments.
What we offer:
- A hybrid and flexible approach to working.
- Transport options to help you get to and from work, including home pick-up and drop-off.
- Meals provided on site in our office.
- Flexible leave options including parental leave, family care leave and celebration leave.
- Insurances for you and your immediate family members.
- Programs to support mental, emotional, financial and physical health & wellbeing.
- Continuous learning and development opportunities to further your technical expertise.
