Posted 25 August, 2026

Principal Engineer

Westpac Group

Sydney, NSW, Australia Full Time

Reference: 218_467287_71307

Create your best future as a Principal Engineer.

What's the role?

Reporting to the Chief Engineer, you'll lead the design and evolution of the engineering capability at Westpac. Working across cloud, Kubernetes, developer platforms, CI/CD, identity, observability and automation, you'll build secure, scalable foundations that enable teams to move faster and deliver with confidence. This is a deeply hands-on technical leadership role. You'll work across architecture, code and operations, influence technical direction, guide teams through complex trade-offs and raise the bar for engineering excellence across the organisation. You'll play a key role in evolving the SDLC into an AI-powered, agentic engineering ecosystem, building the platforms, workflows and guardrails that help teams build, deploy and operate software more effectively.

Your responsibilities will include:

Build Platform Capabilities
Design and build reusable platform services, APIs, tooling and automation.
Develop and evolve internal developer platforms and self-service capabilities.
Simplify complex engineering problems through software and automation.
Lead Technical Direction
Design and build agentic-first, modern engineering SDLC
Help define architecture, engineering standards and platform strategy.
Balance reliability, security, scalability, cost and developer experience.
Drive Operational Excellence
Define SLOs, operational practices and recovery capabilities.
Lead incident investigations and drive continuous improvement.
Embed security and compliance into delivery pipelines and platform services.
Multiply Engineering Impact
Partner with product, engineering, security and architecture leaders.
Convert recurring team needs into reusable platform products.
Mentor engineers and contribute to the broader engineering practice.

What do I need?

To be successful in this role, you will have experience designing, building and operating large-scale platform or internal developer platforms, including:

Public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP)
Kubernetes, Docker and cloud-native technologies
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/OpenTofu/Ansible)
GitOps (Argo CD, Flux)
CI/CD platforms, GitHub Enterprise and Harness
Observability platforms (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry or similar)
API-first and distributed systems design
Software engineering capability, ideally with Go, Rust or TypeScript.
Experience building platform software, automation, CLIs or developer tooling.
Strong debugging, reliability and systems-thinking skills.
Ability to operate comfortably from architecture through to production support.
Strong understanding of AI-native engineering practices, agentic systems and platform architectures that enable an AI-powered SDLC.
Understanding of security engineering principles and software supply chain controls

Why join us?

We're obsessed with becoming our customers' #1 banking partner for life and we're looking for people who are passionate about helping us achieve that goal. In return, we're committed to making Westpac the best place to work in the country. Here are just a few of the ways we're already doing that:

Special offers on banking products and discounts from top brands, including generous employee-only mortgage rates!
Flexible work arrangements to help you achieve a greater work/life balance, and a variety of leave options including Culture, Lifestyle and Wellbeing leave.
Tailored learning and development opportunities to help your grow your career within the bank.
Lots of opportunities to 'give back' to the Community by getting involved in our many volunteering initiatives.

Create your future today

To get started, simply click on the APPLY or APPLY NOW button

We're all about creating a supportive and inclusive community. We welcome everyone - no matter your age, gender, background, or abilities. We also provide additional support to welcome our veterans, Indigenous Australians and neurodiverse community.

If you need any adjustments during the recruitment process, you can find more information and contact details on our FAQs and how to contact us page, under the 'Diversity, sustainability and flexibility' section.

We may close this job advertisement earlier than the advertised closing date if suitable candidates are identified. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

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