Principal Software Engineer
As a Principal Engineer, you will be a senior, hands-on technical leader focused on designing, building and operating the core legacy and strategic cloud API platforms that power our digital banking experiences at scale.
You’ll apply deep expertise in .NET development, software architectures, infrastructure-as-code, cloud platforms, and CI/CD to create secure, reliable and self-service platforms that enable product teams to move fast safely. You’ll work across squads and value streams, shaping architecture and engineering practices, and you’ll stay close to the code and the systems you help design.
This is a high visibility role, which will give you the opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders of the largest and most critical Service Domains under construction. There will be many interesting challenges around scalability, latency, rapid deployment, wide-scale technical integration, and delivery to tight deadlines.
You will:
- Lead the design and implementation of scalable platform capabilities used by multiple product teams.
- Own critical infrastructure and delivery pipelines end-to-end, from design and automation through to runtime operation.
- Actively use AI-powered engineering practices to improve productivity, reliability and quality.
- Mentor engineers, constructively challenge approaches, and help teams solve complex technical problems.
- Balance speed, safety and risk, ensuring better risk outcomes are engineered into our platforms by default.
Key capabilities
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer with strengths aligned to the following capability profile:
- Experience in designing and implementing automation for key platform activities, including certificates and vulnerability remediation.
- Has deep understanding of core API service tiers, both old and new generation (IFW, EP, MP, DHP), and preferably has experience in building some of the large-scale and critical Service Domains that have recently been delivered.
- Continuously explores new tools, patterns and cloud capabilities; quickly learns and applies new technologies, particularly in platform, DevOps and AI-enabled tooling.
- Confidently questions assumptions and designs in a respectful, evidence-based way, helping teams converge on better technical and risk outcomes.
- Decomposes complex problems and scalability challenges into clear, actionable solutions; can navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic trade-offs.
- Leads by example, builds trust, and influences across teams without formal authority; cultivates a culture of ownership, craftsmanship and continuous improvement.
- Understands and owns operational, security and compliance risks in large-scale platforms; bakes risk controls into design, automation and guardrails rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
- Comfortable using and integrating AI and data-driven insights to improve engineering workflows, incident response, capacity planning and platform evolution.
Technical skills
- Expert in coding, scripting and automation (e.g. .Net, AWS SDK) to provision, configure and manage infrastructure and platform services.
- Builds reusable tooling, CLIs and automation frameworks to reduce manual work and improve consistency.
- Designs and manages cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS) using infrastructure-as-code (e.g. CloudFormation, Terraform).
- Designs and supports platforms for large-scale, distributed systems and microservices.
- Defines platform and integration architectures, reference patterns and “golden paths” for product teams.
- Skilled in API, microservices and event-driven design, and how these align with platform capabilities and constraints.
- Implements metrics, logging, tracing and alerting for platform components.
- Contributes to SLO/SLI design, incident response practices and post-incident reviews to improve reliability.
- Designs and operates CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Octopus) for microservices and platform components.
- Implements deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags), automated rollbacks and high-confidence releases at scale.
- Embeds testing at every level (unit, integration, performance, security) into pipelines.
- Promotes testability as a first-class design concern for platform services and infrastructure code.
- Applies security-by-design principles across infrastructure, pipelines and platform services.
- Familiar with secrets management, identity and access control, and security scanning integrated into CI/CD.
- Uses AI tools to enhance coding, testing, triage and documentation.
What you’ll work on
- As a technical leader, taking ownership of the full lifecycle of the API’s that we are delivering on our interim-state platform.
- Taking responsibility of the platform’s operating model, interacting with relevant stakeholders
- Partnering with product and engineering leaders to define platform roadmaps and align them with business and risk objectives.
- Applying innovation to rapidly migrate legacy applications to new Service Domains.
- Improving reliability and operability through better observability, incident tooling and runbooks.
- Uplifting engineering practices across squads through mentorship, technical leadership and clear, opinionated patterns.
If this sounds like you, apply today!
We support our people with the flexibility to balance where work is done with at least half your time each month connecting in the office.
If you're already part of the Commonwealth Bank Group (including Bankwest, x15ventures), you'll need to apply through Sidekick to submit a valid application. We’re keen to support you with the next step in your career.
We're aware of some accessibility issues on this site, particularly for screen reader users. We want to make finding your dream job as easy as possible, so if you require additional support please contact HR Direct on 1800 989 696.
