Staff IT Systems Engineer, ICT Lead (R5660)
Melbourne · 3+ years experience · Onsite · Posted Oct 7, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 3+ years experience
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- Melbourne
About the role
- The Regional ICT Lead is accountable for the design, delivery and secure operation of all information and communications technology supporting Shield AI’s Australian regional hub and its programs across the Asia Pacific and Middle East.
- The role leads a small, high-calibre ICT team and is the single point of regional accountability for network, cloud, endpoint and identity services, and for the compliance controls that allow a US-parented business to deliver sovereign Australian defence outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Lead, develop and grow a small team of ICT professionals; own hiring, performance management, workload allocation, on-call rostering and capability development.
- Set the regional ICT strategy, roadmap and annual operating plan; own the regional ICT budget, forecasting and capital planning.
- Manage local vendors, managed service providers, carriers and licensing agreements, including commercial negotiation and service-level accountability.
- Establish and enforce regional standards for documentation, change management, incident response and service delivery, aligned to ITIL or an equivalent framework.
- Own the end-to-end regional network: campus and access-layer switching, wireless, routing, SD-WAN and WAN services, firewalls, VPN, DNS, DHCP, and monitoring.
- Design and maintain segmented network enclaves that separate corporate, program and test environments in line with data-handling and need-to-know requirements.
- Own site-to-site connectivity with the US parent company and partner organisations, including the controls that govern what traverses those links.
- Deliver connectivity and compute for deployed, remote and flight-test locations, including transportable and low-bandwidth environments.
- Manage server, storage, virtualisation and colocation infrastructure supporting regional engineering and program workloads.
- Own regional cloud architecture and operations across AWS and/or Azure, including landing-zone design, tenancy and subscription structure, identity federation and network integration.
Requirements
- Australian citizenship, and an NV1 security clearance held or the demonstrated ability to obtain and maintain one.
- 10+ years in enterprise ICT across infrastructure, network and systems administration, with progressive increases in scope and accountability.
- 3+ years directly leading technical teams, including hiring, performance management and development of engineers.
- Demonstrated ownership of enterprise networking: routing and switching, SD-WAN or WAN services, firewalls, VLANs and segmentation, wireless, VPN, DNS, DHCP and network monitoring.
- Hands-on cloud engineering and operations experience in AWS and/or Azure, including identity federation, network integration, IaC and cost management.
- Strong administration across Windows, macOS and Linux, with Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, group policy, IAM, Intune and Jamf.
- Practical experience working inside a multinational structure — ideally as the in-country lead reconciling a foreign parent company’s global standards with local regulatory obligations.
- Working knowledge of export control and data-classification regimes, and the ability to translate them into technical controls: ITAR, EAR, the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012, and Australian Government classification and handling requirements.
- Experience operating in classified, need-to-know or otherwise access-restricted environments.
- Scripting and automation capability (PowerShell, Bash or Python) and a strong bias toward automating operational work.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with a defence prime, defence SME or Defence itself, delivering ICT into Australian Defence programs.
- Familiarity with AUKUS Pillar 2 arrangements, licence-free environment provisions, or equivalent bilateral technology-sharing frameworks.
- Experience establishing or maintaining DISP membership, or supporting IRAP assessments and ISM-aligned accreditation.
- Experience standing up ICT for a new site, facility or country entry.
- Exposure to Indo-Pacific delivery, partner-nation engagement or deployed operations.
- Experience automating IT operations and workflows using agentic AI capability.
- Relevant certifications: AWS or Azure architecture, CCNP or equivalent, CISSP, ITIL.
Skills
- AWS
- Azure
- PowerShell
- Bash
- Python
- Active Directory
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Intune
- Jamf
- SD-WAN
