Head of Infrastructure in Sydney, New South Wales at Linkly

About Linkly

Linkly is Australia’s leading supplier of payment integration solutions. Our clients include major banks, utilities, local councils, and major retailers such as Woolworths, David Jones, Myer, JB Hi-Fi, and Bunnings. Our MerchantSuite and BPOINT products are renowned for their reliable recurring billing and IVR features and handle approximately 10% of all online card transactions in Australia. We’re dedicated to streamlining the payment supply chain, allowing our clients to focus on what they do best, running their businesses with confidence and ease.

Our goal is to continuously lead the payments industry with new technology delivering value to clients, which who include merchants, banks, acquirers and POS vendors, expanding our presence into other regions.

About the Role

Payments is a no-downtime industry, and this role is at the heart of it. Reporting to the CTO, the Head of Infrastructure owns the reliability, security, scalability and performance of every platform powering Linkly: in-store middleware, the online payment gateway, transaction switching, and the tooling that supports them.

You will lead a multi-disciplinary team across:

• Platform Operations and Systems Engineering (Card Present and Card Not Present)

• DevOps and CI/CD Platform Engineering

• Network Engineering

• Database Administration and Data Engineering

• Incident Management

This is a hands-on leadership role in a 120-person business. The successful candidate will move comfortably between board-level strategy and the technical detail, driving infrastructure modernisation, operational resilience, and a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership and Strategy

• Define and execute Linkly's Infrastructure strategy, backed by a multi-year roadmap aligned to business priorities and regulatory requirements.
• Lead, mentor and develop a high-performing team with clear career pathways across systems engineering, DevOps, networks and data.
• Set team OKRs and performance measures; partner with the executive team on technology investment and risk decisions.

Reliability, Availability and Performance

• Own availability, latency and capacity targets across Linkly's payments platforms, including four- and five-nines for transaction-critical services.
• Define SLOs, error budgets and operational metrics across CP, CNP and supporting platforms.
• Mature Linkly's SRE practice: observability, automation, golden signals and a post-incident learning culture.
• Maintain disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities with regular DR testing validated against RTO and RPO targets.

Incident and Operational Management

• Act as the senior escalation point for Sev 1 and Sev 2 incidents, owning communication to leadership and external stakeholders.
• Lead post-incident reviews; ensure corrective actions are systemic and tracked to closure.
• Own operational KPIs: MTTR, change failure rate, incident frequency and customer-impact minutes.
• Manage 24/7 on-call coverage sustainably, protecting team wellbeing.

Cloud, Networks and Platform Modernisation

• Lead Linkly's cloud strategy across Azure and AWS, balancing cost, performance, reliability and security.
• Oversee network architecture, connectivity and resilience for real-time payment traffic.
• Drive modernisation initiatives: cloud optimisation, platform consolidation, observability tooling and automation.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships for service quality and commercial value.

Security, Compliance and Risk

• Partner with Security and Compliance to maintain PCI DSS, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 obligations.
• Embed security-by-design principles across Infrastructure, balancing speed with control rigour.
• Keep governance, documentation and operational procedures audit-ready at all times.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Engineering, Delivery, QA, Product, Security and Client Services to deliver business and customer outcomes.
• Translate technical concepts into clear business outcomes for executives, the Board and major clients.
• Represent Infrastructure in commercial conversations with banks, acquirers and enterprise merchants.

What You'll Need

• 12+ years in infrastructure, platform or technical operations leadership, including 5+ years leading multi-disciplinary teams.
• A player-coach approach, comfortable setting strategy and debugging a production issue in the same week, in a small-business environment without a large support function.
• Proven track record in payments, fintech, transaction switching or another mission-critical, high-availability environment.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale infrastructure transformation programmes end to end.
• Strong technical depth across cloud (Azure, AWS), networking, systems architecture, observability, automation and security.
• Hands-on experience with four- and five-nines availability targets, SLOs, error budgets and SRE principles.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity experience in regulated environments, including RTO/RPO validation.
• Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and other payments-relevant frameworks.
• Outstanding communication skills, able to brief executives, present to clients and lead through high-pressure incidents.
• Commercial judgement and a track record of attracting, retaining and developing specialist infrastructure talent.
  
  

Our Values

• Act Like an Owner: Take full accountability for outcomes and make decisions with the long-term success of Linkly in mind.
• Innovate: Continuously seek better ways to build, lead and deliver, driving meaningful change for customers and the business.
• Deepen Trust: Build trust through transparency, consistency and integrity with your team, partners and clients.
• Care and Respect: Foster an inclusive, supportive environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to do their best work.