Platform Reliability Engineering Manager

Firmus Technologies

Firmus Technologies is a global leader pioneering the development and operation of efficient AI infrastructure across Asia Pacific.  

Founded in Australia in 2019, our mission is to create the most efficient AI infrastructure by combining cutting-edge technology with a steadfast commitment to sustainability. 

At Firmus, we are unique in our approach. We design, build, and operate a new class of digital infrastructure – the AI Factory. Through our model-to-grid technology approach, we have pushed the boundaries of multi-generational liquid cooling systems, energy management, AI software orchestration, and construction. For our customers, this approach allows us to make every watt count and deliver low-cost AI tokens globally. 

 

Firmus AI Cloud

Our large-scale GPU cloud platform, Firmus AI Cloud, is purpose-built to deliver energy-efficient AI compute at scale to customers. 

It empowers developers, enterprises, educational institutions, and government users to train and deploy AI models with unmatched efficiency and cost savings. With an ever-growing suite of services and applications, we are committed to delivering a cloud experience that is market-leading, proprietary, and built to scale. 

 

AI FactoryOS Operations 

AI FactoryOS is Firmus' proprietary operating system for the AI Factory. It governs GPU telemetry, cooling, power and grid interaction as one integrated layer, so that every Firmus site can be optimised and monitored as a single system. 

AI FactoryOS Operations runs that platform in production and owns the 24/7 reliability of AI FactoryOS, Firmus AI Cloud and the platforms built on them, together with the service levels the estate is measured against. 

The remit is an engineering one. The function builds the guarded automation, remediation and operational tooling that turn manual response into a software-defined capability, and builds and operates the shared services the estate's own operation depends on. The function works closely with the engineering teams that build the platform, supplying the production evidence that shapes what they fix and what they build next. 

 

Role Summary  

Firmus runs large-scale, state-of-the-art AI infrastructure built on the latest generation of GPU rack-scale systems and operated as one estate to power the next generation of AI innovation. The Platform Reliability Engineering Manager leads the platform reliability team: the engineers who take on incidents escalated from the Global and Site Operation Centres and manage them through to resolution, and the Service Delivery Managers who run incident, change and problem management. Together they work with the operations centres and the specialist engineering teams to keep the estate within the service levels it is measured against. 

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, and strong technical competence is a core requirement of it. The role is expected to step into complex faults alongside the engineers, guide the diagnosis and recovery, and judge the technical quality of the team's work. The role manages the team's 24/7 on-call operation, its escalation paths to the specialist engineering teams, and its service level objectives. The team treats operations as a software problem, and the role leads the work of turning what the team learns into runbooks, guarded automation and permanent fixes. 

 

 Key Responsibilities 

• Lead and manage the platform reliability team, including hiring, onboarding, performance, development and wellbeing across regions. 

• Manage the team's 24/7 on-call and incident command rosters, with cover across regions. 

• Serve on the incident command roster and act as incident commander for major incidents on rostered weeks, alongside the Service Delivery Managers. 

• Act as a senior technical escalation point for the team: join complex faults, guide diagnosis and recovery, and review the technical quality of the root cause analysis, runbooks and automation the team produces. 

• Manage the service level objectives for the services the team supports, and report service performance to leadership. 

• Work with the specialist engineering teams on clear escalation paths and response commitments. 

• Hold the team to its incident, change and problem management practice, and arbitrate when speed and process pull in different directions during an incident. 

• Drive the team's runbook and automation work, so that common faults are fixed once and handled by runbooks or automation, and engineers have time to build automation between on-call weeks. 

• Build a clear development path for the team's engineers into senior specialist roles, with mentoring and rotations agreed with the other engineering managers. 

• Work with the Service Delivery Managers and the engineering teams so that new and changed services are ready to support in production. 

• Turn production evidence, such as incident trends and repeat causes, into clear improvement requirements for the engineering teams, and follow them to closure. 

• Manage customer and leadership reporting on service health with the Service Delivery Managers, and attend customer service reviews where contractual response commitments are discussed. 

• Keep the team's ITSM, on-call and operational tooling fit for purpose. 

 

Skills & Experience 

• Solid hands-on engineering experience in infrastructure operations or site reliability engineering (Linux, networking, storage, Kubernetes or virtualisation), with the technical depth to lead a recovery, question a diagnosis and judge whether an escalation carries enough evidence. 

• Significant experience leading a 24/7 operations, SRE or production engineering team in a large-scale hosting, HPC, telecommunications, data centre or service provider environment, including running on-call rosters and incident response. 

• Working ability in scripting or programming (for example Python, Go or Bash) and in infrastructure as code, enough to review the team's automation and runbook code. 

• Working knowledge of site reliability engineering practice, including service level objectives, error budgets, toil reduction, runbook automation and production readiness, applied alongside formal incident, change and problem management. 

• Clear communication and sound judgement, including under pressure. 

• Experience with ITSM, on-call and observability tooling (for example Jira Service Management, ServiceNow, PagerDuty and Grafana). 

• Experience building and developing engineering teams, including hiring at pace, coaching early-career engineers, setting performance expectations and growing people into senior roles. 

 

Preferred Experience 

• Experience as a major incident commander, including communicating with stakeholders under pressure and leading post-incident reviews. 

• Experience operating GPU, HPC or AI infrastructure, including the failure modes of large-scale distributed training and inference. 

• Experience in a multi-tenant service provider, cloud or colocation environment with customer-facing reporting. 

• Experience working under contractual response commitments and compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2. 

• Experience setting up a new operations function or team, including rosters, escalation paths and standards. 

• Experience leading teams across time zones with follow-the-sun handovers. 

• ITIL or an equivalent service management qualification. 

 

Location & Reporting 

Location: Based in Australia or Singapore, with travel to Australian AI Factory sites as required. 

On-call: The function runs 24/7. First line monitoring and first response sit with the operations centre. This role serves on the incident command roster with the Service Delivery Managers and is the escalation point for the team outside hours. 

Reporting to:  Reports to the Head of AI FactoryOS Operations, working under broad direction with a high degree of autonomy. This role leads a team of 5 to 10 engineers and service delivery staff. 

 

 

Employment Basis

Permanent full-time

 

Diversity

At Firmus, we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds who are passionate about creating a more sustainable future through innovative engineering solutions.

Join us in our mission to revolutionize the AI industry through sustainable practices and cutting-edge engineering. Apply now to be part of shaping the future of sustainable AI infrastructure.