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
• Observability tooling - Grafana (the team is moving towards Grafana for observability), Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo

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