Sydney or Melbourne | Hybrid | 12-month day rate contract
An prospect for an experiencedStaff/Principal-level Engineerto 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 evolvehigh-scale, event-driven and distributed systems
Help drive the adoption ofTemporal.ioand modern workflow orchestration patterns
Set engineering standards acrossKotlin, Java and the JVM ecosystem
Solve complex problems around scalability, resilience, concurrency and system reliability
Shape cloud-native architecture acrossGCP, GKE/Kubernetes, Postgres and BigQuery
Work acrossReact and TypeScriptwhere required, connecting modern frontend applications with JVM services
Improve developer experience, observability andCI/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 atStaff, Principal or senior Technical Lead level.
We're particularly interested in engineers with:
Deep commercial experience withJava and/or Kotlin
Strong knowledge ofdistributed systems and event-driven architecture
Experience with technologies such asKafka, Pub/Sub, Temporal, Cadence or similar
StrongKubernetes and cloud-native engineeringexperience
Experience building complex, high-scale product or SaaS platforms
EnoughReact/TypeScriptexperience to operate effectively across the stack
A track record of influencing architecture and raising engineering standards without relying on formal authority
DirectTemporal.ioexperience would be highly regarded, but isn't essential if you bring solid distributed systems and workflow orchestration fundamentals.
Why consider it?
This is an opportunity to combine thescale 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 behands-on with difficult technical problemswhile having broader architectural influence, this is worth a conversation.
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📌 Staff Engineer - Kotlin / Gcp (New South Wales)
🏢 The Onset
📍 New South Wales