Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering

• Build the platforms, APIs, event streaming capabilities and self-service tools that thousands of engineers rely on to deliver software safely, quickly and at scale. 

• Stay hands-on in the code, shaping what gets built next, solving complex technical challenges and taking solutions from idea to production. 

• Create products engineers choose to use, owning outcomes end-to-end and delivering capabilities that drive adoption, productivity and engineering excellence. 

Our people are customer obsessed. They prioritise the needs and satisfaction of the customer above all else. Our mindset fosters innovation and creates strong, lasting customer relationships as we strive to be the most customer centric company in Australia and New Zealand.  

In this Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering, role, you will join our Integration and Tech Governance team owning it and winning together. 

Each day, you’ll go above and beyond to support with:  

• Build the platform. Design, code and ship the services, libraries, templates and self-service tooling that engineers use every day. You will write production code and be on the hook when it breaks. 

• Treat engineers as customers. Talk to the teams using our platform, find out where they lose time, and fix it. Set a roadmap, measure adoption and retire what nobody uses instead of maintaining it forever. 

• Make the paved road the fastest road. Build templates, scaffolding, pipelines, provisioning and observability defaults so that doing the right thing takes less effort than working around it. Adoption should be earned, not mandated. 

• Design services that hold up. Break large systems into services with clean boundaries drawn around the business domain, and deal honestly with what those costs: versioning, contracts, data ownership, failure modes and the sprawl that follows when boundaries are wrong. 

• Build event driven capability. Ship event streaming and messaging that teams can use without a specialist in the room. Schemas, contracts, delivery guarantees, replay, ordering and idempotency handled in the platform rather than rediscovered by every team. 

• Automate first. Push testing, security, quality and control into pipelines and tooling. If something needs a human checkpoint, look for a way to encode it before accepting the meeting. 

• Set direction and take people with you. Decide what we build and why, make the case in plain language, and lead multiple squads through influence rather than reporting lines. Mentor senior engineers and raise the standard of what gets shipped. 

• Run it like a business. Know what the platform costs, what it saves and what it returns. Size investment, sequence work, make trade-offs explicit and say no to work that does not earn its place. 

We’re looking for the best and brightest to deliver the best for our customers. You’ll need:   

• Deep hands-on experience building and operating microservices at scale, including the parts that go wrong under load and over time. 

• Practical grounding in domain driven design used as a working tool for drawing service and data boundaries, not as vocabulary. 

• Production experience with event driven systems on Kafka or equivalent, covering schema management, contracts and streaming patterns. 

• A track record building developer platforms, internal tooling or developer experience products that other engineering teams chose to adopt. 

• Experience with large scale distributed systems: multi region, high availability, performance and resilience under real traffic. 

• Automation first habits evidenced in what you have shipped, across infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing strategy and policy as code. 

• Product instincts. You have shipped, gathered feedback, iterated and cut scope, whether your users were customers or engineers. 

• Experience setting technical direction for several teams and being accountable for whether it worked. 

• The ability to hold a conversation about cost, risk and sequencing with executives, and about implementation detail with engineers, on the same day.