Infrastructure Engineer - Hardware & Networks

We are hiring an Infrastructure Engineer to build and operate the bare-metal compute and network infrastructure that SQC's research and engineering depend on: the servers, racks, switches and network fabric that everything else in the company runs on.

Based at our Sydney facility, you will work close to real hardware and real physics. By the nature of our quantum computers, most of our compute is on-premise, and it is growing. Simulation clusters, FPGA accelerator hosts for our quantum control stack, lab and instrument networks, and the Kubernetes platform layered above all of it. When a research team needs a new cluster, someone racks it, cables it, wires it into the fabric, configures it into our codebase, gives it addresses and names and time, and hands it over as a working, reproducible piece of infrastructure.

The method matters as much as the outcome. We operate these fleets in code: Ansible playbooks and roles, version-controlled inventories, declarative network configuration, provisioning that runs from bare metal to a secured, running Kubernetes node without a human typing into a terminal.

Some of what you connect is a general-purpose compute node. Some of it is a control host with accelerator cards in it, sitting a few metres from a dilution refrigerator, with timing requirements that ordinary enterprise networks never have to think about. This is a role for someone who wants to own physical infrastructure end to end, operate it as code, and stay close to the hardware.

• →Own the bare-metal cluster server fleets end to end: racking, cabling, provisioning, firmware and BMC management, lifecycle and decommissioning across central, research and control clusters
• →Design, build and operate the network infrastructure alongside central IT: switching, routing, VLANs and segmentation, link and route aggregation, firewall policy, and the high-speed fabrics behind compute and storage
• →Drive all of it through Ansible and infrastructure-as-code, so builds are repeatable and changes are reviewable
• →Build and maintain the automated provisioning pipelines that take a new rack from power-on to a validated, benchmarked, ready cluster
• →Run and maintain Kubernetes on this hardware, including CNI, load balancing, storage integration and node lifecycle
• →Operate core network services: DNS, DHCP, NTP and time distribution, PXE and netboot, certificates
• →Support hardware bring-up: BIOS and firmware tuning, BMC configuration, PCIe topology and NUMA alignment on accelerator hosts
• →Support the compute, control and lab hardware that research and engineering depend on, including accelerator-card hosts and instrument networks
• →Instrument the servers, fabric and provisioning path so monitoring and telemetry has something to work with
• →Plan capacity, power, cooling and rack layout alongside facilities and procurement
• →Document architecture, operational procedures and validation results so the next person can run what you built
• →Monitor platform and network health, respond to incidents, and fix the underlying cause rather than the symptom

• 4+ years in infrastructure, network or platform engineering, with substantial hands-on bare-metal work
• Deep Ansible experience: roles, inventories, idempotent design, and how to test and structure a real playbook estate
• Solid network engineering across layers 2 and 3: VLANs, subnetting, routing protocols such as BGP or OSPF, link aggregation, firewall and ACL policies
• Strong Linux systems administration and scripting (Bash, Python), including kernel, drivers, cgroups and system services
• Infrastructure-as-code beyond configuration management (Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi or equivalent) and a Git-based change workflow
• Production Kubernetes experience, ideally on hardware you also own
• Bare-metal provisioning with tools such as MaaS, Metal3, OpenStack Ironic, Tinkerbell, xCAT or equivalent
• Working knowledge of firmware, BIOS and BMC management via IPMI or Redfish
• Core network services in production: DNS, DHCP, NTP, PXE
• Comfortable in a data centre or comms room: racking, structured cabling, optics and transceivers, out-of-band management
• Troubleshooting that crosses layers, from a marginal optic to a route that never propagated to a pod that will not schedule, with the communication skills to explain it to teams who are not networking or infrastructure specialists
• Experience on an on-call rotation supporting production services
• Clear technical writing and attention to detail

• Low-latency or high-throughput fabrics: 100/400G Ethernet, InfiniBand, RoCE
• EKS-A experience
• Precision time distribution (PTP, White Rabbit)
• Network automation and source-of-truth tooling (NetBox, Nornir, containerlab, Batfish)
• Vendor platforms such as Arista EOS, Cisco NX-OS, Juniper Junos or Dell OS10
• HPC, scientific or research computing environments, including batch schedulers such as Slurm
• Cluster benchmarking and performance validation, and the automation around it
• Monitoring and telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana, syslog, Filebeat)
• PCIe accelerator hardware (FPGA or GPU) knowledge, including firmware and driver management
• Container runtimes beyond Docker (Podman, Singularity, Enroot)
• Go or Rust alongside Python
• Laboratory or scientific instrument networks
• Curiosity about quantum computing, no physics degree required

SQC is an equal opportunity employer. We value diverse perspectives and experiences, and encourage applications from candidates who may not meet every listed requirement. If you’re excited about the role and believe you can contribute, we encourage you to apply.

This position may require access to export-controlled information or technology. Employment may be subject to applicable export control laws and may require eligibility assessment based on factors such as nationality, citizenship, or residency, and, where necessary, obtaining relevant export licenses or approvals.

SQC was founded by renowned physicist and materials scientist Michelle Simmons, who pioneered the field of atomic electronics, including the development of the world’s first single-atom transistor and the first integrated circuit built with atomic precision. Our Chair, Simon Segars, former CEO of Arm, is a leader in the semiconductor industry and was instrumental in developing the processors that powered the mobile computing revolution.