Job Description

Sydney or Melbourne | Hybrid | 12-month day rate contract

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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.

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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.

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The opportunity

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You'll operate as a senior hands-on individual contributor, working alongside experienced engineers and engineering leadership to:

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- Design and evolve high-scale, event-driven and distributed systems
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- Help drive the adoption of Temporal.io and modern workflow orchestration patterns
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- Set engineering standards across Kotlin, Java and the JVM ecosystem
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- Solve complex problems around scalability, resilience, concurrency and system reliability
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- Shape cloud-native architecture across GCP, GKE/Kubernetes, Postgres and BigQuery
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- Work across React and TypeScript where required, connecting modern frontend applications with JVM services
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- Improve developer experience, observability and CI/CD through GitHub Actions
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- Mentor senior engineers through technical leadership, pairing and high-impact code reviews
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- Influence technical roadmaps while remaining close to the code
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What we're looking for

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You'll likely have extensive software engineering experience and be operating at Staff, Principal or senior Technical Lead level.

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We're particularly interested in engineers with:

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- Deep commercial experience with Java and/or Kotlin
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- Strong knowledge of distributed systems and event-driven architecture
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- Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, Temporal, Cadence or similar
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- Strong Kubernetes and cloud-native engineering experience
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- Experience building complex, high-scale product or SaaS platforms
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- Enough React/TypeScript experience to operate effectively across the stack
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- A track record of influencing architecture and raising engineering standards without relying on formal authority
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Direct Temporal.io experience would be highly regarded, but isn't essential if you bring strong distributed systems and workflow orchestration fundamentals.

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Why consider it? This is an opportunity to combine the scale and complexity of a major Australian brand with genuine greenfield engineering.

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You'll join at a point where important architectural decisions are still being made, giving you the prospect to influence how systems are designed, how engineering teams work and how the platform evolves.

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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