Infrastructure Engineer, Hardware & Networks

We are hiring an Infrastructure Engineer into Platform & Infrastructure, at the physical and network end of the platform, driven from code: the servers, racks, switches and fabric everything else in the company runs on.

Most of our compute is on-premise and growing. Simulation clusters, FPGA accelerator hosts for the quantum control stack, lab and instrument networks, and Kubernetes above all of it. When a team needs a cluster, someone racks it, cables it, wires it into the fabric, configures it in code, gives it addresses, names and time, and hands it over reproducible. Every quantum computer we build also gets a cluster of its own, so the count tracks machines rather than headcount. Soon more than ten edge clusters will exist across the R&D estate.

We run these fleets in code: Ansible roles, version-controlled inventories, declarative network configuration, and provisioning that goes from bare metal to a secured Kubernetes node without anyone typing into a terminal. Some of what you connect is a general-purpose compute node. Some is a control host with accelerator cards in it, metres from a dilution refrigerator, with timing requirements ordinary enterprise networks never have.

Based at our Sydney facility, you will work with central IT, facilities and the research and engineering teams whose hardware you stand up. This is a role for someone equally at home in a comms room and a Git repository, who wants every build to be repeatable and every change reviewable.

• →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 our network infrastructure together with central IT: switching, routing, VLANs and segmentation, link and route aggregation, firewall policy, and the high-speed fabrics behind the 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
• →Build the cluster that ships with each quantum computer, to the same specification every time, in our own labs
• →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 teams depend on, including accelerator-card hosts and instrument networks
• →Instrument the servers, fabric and provisioning path so our monitoring and telemetry function has something to work with
• →Plan capacity, power, cooling and rack layout alongside facilities and procurement
• →Monitor platform and network health, respond to incidents, fix the underlying cause rather than the symptom, and document architecture, operational procedures and validation results so the next person can run what you built

• 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, and 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 Anywhere experience
• Precision time distribution (PTP, White Rabbit or similar)
• Network automation and source-of-truth tooling (NetBox, Nornir, containerlab, Batfish)
• Vendor platforms such as Arista EOS, Cisco NX-OS, Juniper Junos, 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
• Repeatable build-out of many identical sites or clusters, including remote and air-gapped ones
• 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.