Job Description
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
Solid 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 strong 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.
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📌 Staff Engineer - Kotlin / Gcp (New South Wales)
🏢 The Onset
📍 New South Wales