Engineering Lead (Developer Platform & AI-enabled SDLC)

As Engineering Lead – Developer Platform & AI-enabled SDLC, you'll establish and lead the team responsible for Virgin Australia's internal developer platform and golden paths. You'll treat the platform as a product, with our engineers as its customers, creating secure, reliable and self-service capabilities that make the preferred way of delivering software the easiest way. This is a player-coach role combining team leadership, product thinking and hands-on technical direction. You'll work across Engineering, Product, Security, Architecture, Risk and Operations to reduce developer cognitive load and improve the speed, safety and reliability of software delivery.

Establish and grow the platform engineering team, its operating model, engineering practices and ownership boundaries.

Develop the platform vision and roadmap using developer research, workflow data and continuous feedback.

Deliver a minimum viable platform incrementally, beginning with the developer journeys where improved self-service will create the greatest value.

Design composable platform capabilities exposed through clear APIs, automation, templates, documentation and developer-facing workflows.

Create golden paths with secure defaults, actionable feedback and appropriate escape hatches—enabling teams without unnecessarily constraining them.

Embed automated testing, observability, resilience, policy as code and software-supply-chain controls into delivery workflows.

Establish service-level objectives for the platform and measure its impact through adoption, developer experience, delivery performance, reliability, security and cost outcomes.

Create contribution and extension models that allow engineering teams to help evolve the platform without making the central team a bottleneck.

Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted engineering capabilities through controlled experiments, measurable outcomes and appropriate security, privacy, intellectual-property and human-review safeguards.

Hire, coach and develop engineers while building an inclusive culture of ownership, learning and continuous improvement.