“Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Jim Lovell, Apollo 13. He had a team of engineers on the ground. Does your production environment?

It’s 2am, the pager has gone off, and the only person who understands your Kubernetes cluster is on a plane to Bali.

You’ve been meaning to hire a Platform or DevOps Engineer for months. A proper one. AWS or GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, CI and CD that actually runs, observability that tells you something before the customers do. The role has been open on your careers page since before the last outage. It’s attracted a lot of people who’ve “worked with cloud” and not many who’ve owned it.

So here’s a different kind of advert. It isn’t a job. It’s Big Wave Digital telling Sydney, in public, that we have capacity right now to run a Platform or DevOps Engineer search, and we’d like to run yours.

Yes, we have capacity. Briefly

We’re a two person desk, Keiran Hathorn and Jules Semmens, and we keep it small so every search gets finished. A slot has just opened on the infrastructure side of the desk. That’s rare, and we’d rather fill it with a platform engineering search than anything else, because it’s a market where knowing the difference between a real SRE and a sysadmin with a recent title saves everyone a lot of time.

Your deployment pipeline, after you hire the right person. Before is mostly smoke.

What we actually know about platform people in Sydney

Keiran started in technical support before moving into tech recruitment in 1998, so he’s one of the few recruiters in Sydney who has personally been paged. Big Wave Digital has been placing infrastructure, cloud and platform engineers as a specialist agency since 2010, which covers the move from racks to VMs to containers to whatever we’re calling it this year. We know which Sydney teams run serious Kubernetes at scale, which ones say they do, and which engineers moved between them.

On the first call, free of charge, we’ll tell you:

- What a senior Platform Engineer,



SRE or DevOps Engineer is being paid in Sydney this quarter, and what the Terraform and Kubernetes premium currently looks like.
- Whether you’re hiring a Platform Engineer, an SRE, a DevOps Engineer or a Cloud Engineer, because the market treats those as four different people with four different price tags, even if your job description doesn’t.
- Which Sydney companies have just finished a cloud migration or had a restructure, which means experienced platform people are suddenly reachable.
- Why your ad is drawing contractors who want a day rate instead of the permanent engineer you want, and how to fix the first three lines.

Who you’ll be working with

Keiran Hathorn founded Big Wave Digital in 2010 and has close to 30 years in recruitment. Before that, technical support. Before that, a croupier in the high rollers room at Sydney’s casino, which he credits for his pattern recognition and his ability to stay calm while someone insists they “architected the whole platform.” He takes your brief personally, interviews every candidate personally, and tells you on day one if the budget needs to grow or the wish list needs to shrink.

Jules Semmens runs the parallel search alongside him. While Keiran is interviewing, Jules is mapping the market, chasing the quiet candidates and keeping the timeline honest. Two people, one role, zero handoffs.

Big Wave Digital, named for a reason. We’re also very good at not getting wiped out.

The awards shelf

Nobody’s uptime improved because their recruiter won a trophy, but since you’re deciding who to trust:

- SEEK SARA Award, Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Winner
- SEEK SARA Award,



Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Runner Up, twice
- AIMIA Awards, Best Business Website, Finalist
- Recruitment International, Best Recruitment Company to Work For, Finalist
- JobAdvisor Top 10 Coolest SME Companies to Work For
- 2026 Randwick City Business Excellence Awards, Finalist

The figure we’d rather you noticed is 89 percent. That’s the share of our clients who come back for the next hire.

Why us

Because the big agencies treat “DevOps” as a keyword and send you everyone whose CV contains it. Because a platform engineer who can’t explain an incident they ran is not a platform engineer, and we ask. Because every candidate you see from us has been interviewed by Keiran or Jules, told what the role really is, and asked the uncomfortable questions about salary, notice, visa and other interviews before they hit your inbox.

We’ve built engineering and infrastructure teams for Apple, Universal Music, Leonardo.ai, Spacetalk, Hoselink and Crypto.com, and a long run of Sydney scale ups who needed their platform to stop being one person’s hobby. We still answer our own phones. Often at odd hours. Occupational hazard.

How it works

1. Email or call Keiran. Twenty minutes on the stack, the pain, the team and the budget.
2. We tell you straight whether we can fill it, how long it’ll take and what it’ll cost.
3. Within days, a short list of three to five people who can genuinely run your platform and genuinely want to.
4. We manage interviews, feedback, the offer and the counter offer. You get a Platform Engineer. The pager gets quieter.

Grab the slot before the next incident

Hiring a Platform, SRE or DevOps Engineer in Sydney? Email ******@bigwavedigital.com.au, call +61 2 9380 4431, or connect with us here.

Tell us what’s on fire. We’ll tell you who in Sydney has put it out before.

Big Wave Digital. Sydney’s specialist technology, AI and digital marketing recruiters since 2010. Platform engineering search slot open now.

📌 Platform / DevOps Engineer: AWS, Kubernetes & Terraform | Sydney | Need One Hired? Yes, We Have Capacity Now
🏢 Big Wave Digital
📍 Sydney