"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 new 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…