Sydney or Melbourne | Hybrid | 12-month day rate contract
An opportunity for an experienced
Staff/Principal-level Engineer
to play a key technical role in a major greenfield and transformation program within one of Australia's most recognised consumer brands.
This isn't a maintenance role. You'll help shape the next generation of a high-scale digital platform, solving complex distributed systems problems and influencing architecture, engineering standards and technology direction.
The opportunity
You'll operate as a senior hands-on individual contributor, working alongside experienced engineers and engineering leadership to:
Design and evolve
high-scale, event-driven and distributed systems
Help drive the adoption of
Temporal.io
and modern workflow orchestration patterns
Set engineering standards across
Kotlin, Java and the JVM ecosystem
Solve complex problems around scalability, resilience, concurrency and system reliability
Shape cloud-native architecture across
GCP, GKE/Kubernetes, Postgres and BigQuery
Work across
React and TypeScript
where required, connecting modern frontend applications with JVM services
Improve developer experience, observability and
CI/CD through GitHub Actions
Mentor senior engineers through technical leadership, pairing and high-impact code reviews
Influence technical roadmaps while remaining close to the code
What we're looking for




You'll likely have extensive software engineering experience and be operating at
Staff, Principal or senior Technical Lead level
.
We're particularly interested in engineers with:
Deep commercial experience with
Java and/or Kotlin
Strong knowledge of
distributed systems and event-driven architecture
Experience with technologies such as
Kafka, Pub/Sub, Temporal, Cadence or similar
Strong
Kubernetes and cloud-native engineering
experience
Experience building complex, high-scale product or SaaS platforms
Enough
React/TypeScript
experience to operate effectively across the stack
A track record of influencing architecture and raising engineering standards without relying on formal authority
Direct
Temporal.io
experience would be highly regarded, but isn't essential if you bring robust distributed systems and workflow orchestration fundamentals.
Why consider it? This is an opportunity to combine the
scale and complexity of a major Australian brand with genuine greenfield engineering
.
You'll join at a point where important architectural decisions are still being made, giving you the opportunity to influence how systems are designed, how engineering teams work and how the platform evolves.
If you're a senior engineer who still wants to be
hands-on with difficult technical problems
while having broader architectural influence, this is worth a conversation.
#J-*****-Ljbffr

📌 Staff Engineer - Kotlin / Gcp (Sydney)
🏢 The Onset
📍 Sydney