Windows Infrastructure Engineer (AWS)
Windows/AWS - Systems Engineer and Site reliability Engineer
About the Company
Our client is a high-performing organisation operating within the financial services industry, delivering advanced technology solutions across cloud, infrastructure, and enterprise Windows platforms. Having migrated from an on-premises environment to AWS, they now run a significant Windows server estate in the cloud and are investing heavily in modernising their Windows and cloud platform capabilities to support complex, customer-facing systems.
About the Role
This is a hands-on Windows Systems Engineer / Windows Systems Administrator role with strong AWS skills, combining two key areas in roughly equal measure:
- ~50% Windows engineering and AWS infrastructure
- ~50% traditional Windows systems administration and corporate IT support
You will be building robust automation, managing directory services, and standardising configuration-as-code while also supporting day-to-day corporate IT needs. You'll partner closely with software engineering, database administration, and security teams to embed modern cloud infrastructure practices.
Windows capability is the primary requirement for this role - candidates need strong, all-round Windows engineering expertise, ideally paired with AWS or broader cloud/SRE experience as a point of differentiation.
Location & Working Arrangement
- Based in North Sydney, 3 days per week in the office, 2 days from home
- Participation in an on-call roster is mandatory (approximately one week on, every 3-4 weeks, with potential to reduce as the environment and automation mature)
Key Responsibilities
- Day-to-day administration of Windows servers running in AWS
- Investigate and resolve performance issues across Windows and cloud infrastructure
- Build, and operate Windows-based AWS cloud services, including enterprise workloads, Active Directory replication, storage (FSx/S3), and database layers
- Take hands-on ownership of service delivery from implementation through to production deployment and ongoing operations
- Administer AWS Systems Manager (SSM), AWS policies, and role-based access control
- S3 administration
- Create scalable systems through automation and platform uplifts, identifying opportunities to reduce manual effort via PowerShell and AWS SSM
- Control configuration drift and manage automated patching across the Windows fleet
- Ensure comprehensive observability and alerting across Windows and underlying cloud systems; provision live system metrics, SLO, alerting, and operational reporting dashboards
- Provide traditional Windows systems administration and support to corporate IT / desktop support teams
- VPN administration and troubleshooting (Netskope)
- Microsoft OneDrive / Microsoft 365 administration
- Provide emergency response and technical leadership during system outages or incidents; conduct post-mortems, root cause analysis, and problem rectification
- Champion AI-assisted, spec-driven automation practices, using tools such as Claude Code or similar LLM-based coding assistants
- Potentially contribute to broader automation initiatives, including CI/CD
- Develop and maintain runbooks, infrastructure diagrams, and OS baseline standard documentation
Skills & Experience
Critical:
- Strong Windows administration / engineering skills - Active Directory Domain Services, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, ADCS, IIS, failover clustering, patching, and hardening
- Commercial AWS experience, including Windows workloads on EC2 with Systems Manager, backup, and DR
- SCCM / Configuration Manager experience - site and distribution point administration, OS deployment and imaging, application packaging, patch compliance, configuration baselines, collections, and reporting; complementary tooling such as WSUS, MDT, or Group Policy deployment also expected
- Strong troubleshooting capability across both infrastructure and corporate IT environments
- Strong PowerShell scripting and automation capability across Windows Server and AWS estates
- SRE practices, including defining and managing SLOs and error budgets
Nice-to-have:
- Netskope
- Microsoft 365 administration (Entra ID, Exchange Online, Intune, Purview)
- MDM / Intune
- Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
- Observability tooling - Grafana (the team is moving towards Grafana for observability), Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo
- CI/CD, particularly GitLab CI/CD (pipeline-as-code, merge request workflows, deployment guardrails)
Ideal Candidate Profile
An all-round Windows engineer who has developed strong AWS/cloud capabilities - potentially someone who has moved from a Windows/Systems Engineering background into cloud or SRE work. The ideal candidate combines both skill sets rather than being purely an SRE/cloud engineer and should be at least comparable to a strong internal Windows candidate in Windows expertise, with additional strength in AWS or another relevant area providing differentiation.
Certifications
- Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate, or MCSA/MCSE: Windows Server equivalent - very highly regarded
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate or Solutions Architect - Associate - very highly regarded; AWS Specialty certifications (Security, Advanced Networking) highly regarded
- Terraform Associate or Professional certification well regarded
- Microsoft 365 (MS-102) and Juniper (JNCIA-SEC or above) certifications desirable