DevOps Engineer

Build and operate the infrastructure behind Praetorian’s autonomous defence systems — deployed on-premises and at the edge. About Praetorian

Praetorian Aeronautics builds advanced autonomous aerial systems designed to protect and defend against the rapidly evolving threat of drone warfare. Headquartered in Adelaide, with offices in Melbourne and Darwin, we’re building an integrated ecosystem of counter-autonomy systems that let defence operators detect, assess and defeat autonomous threats in contested environments.

This role sits across all four systems, building the infrastructure that gets our software running reliably in the field.

The Role

Our systems run on hardware in vehicles, ground stations and test ranges, not in a cloud data centre. You’ll own how we build, deploy and run technology across the company: the pipelines that take our Rust and Python software from commit to field-ready, the networks and servers our teams depend on, and the systems that get software onto hardware in manufacturing and production.

You’ll work with autonomy, robotics, command-and-control and production teams to make deployment reliable, repeatable and secure, from the lab to the production line to disconnected environments in the field.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for software deployed to embedded and on-prem hardware

• Design and run company infrastructure, including servers, networks and internal tooling, using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management

• Improve how software and firmware are loaded, versioned and tracked on hardware through manufacturing and production

• Set up monitoring, logging and observability across lab, production and field systems

• Build infrastructure for edge and air-gapped environments, with security and compliance in mind

• Identify bottlenecks in how we build and ship, and drive improvements across teams

What We’re Looking For

• Strong experience in DevOps, platform or infrastructure engineering

• Strong experience with on-prem or edge infrastructure, comfortable working close to hardware without cloud tooling to fall back on

• Proficiency in Linux systems administration, networking and server infrastructure

• Experience with containerisation and configuration management (e.g. Docker/Podman, Ansible)

• A systems-thinking approach: you look at how the whole pipeline works, not just your piece of it

• Australian citizen, eligible to obtain and maintain an AGSVA security clearance

Nice to Have

• Experience with cross-compilation for embedded targets

• Experience supporting manufacturing or production environments (e.g. test stations, firmware flashing, traceability)

• Experience with air-gapped, classified or disconnected networks

• Experience supporting systems in degraded or bandwidth-limited (DDIL) environments

• Experience with Rust or Python

• Background in defence, aerospace or robotics

Why Praetorian

• Competitive salary and employee share option plan (ESOP)

• Work on advanced autonomy and defence technology with a small, highly technical team

• Real ownership and influence as we scale

• Professional development and learning opportunities

Don’t tick every box? We’d still like to hear from you.