Chief Engineer - Finance and Risk Technology

Specific work or activities you will perform: 

Lead the modernisation of Finance & Risk technology platforms, including legacy system simplification, cloud adoption, resilience uplift, and establishment of engineering standards across software, data, and AI engineering. Provide enterprise-level technical leadership for platform architecture, data governance, AI integration, secure engineering practices, and operational resilience across critical Finance & Risk systems.

Business outcome this work enables: 

Improves the resilience, scalability, and reliability of Finance & Risk platforms and strengthens the quality, traceability, and governance of financial and risk data used for regulatory reporting and decision-making. Enables faster and lower-risk delivery of regulatory, audit, and business initiatives through modernised architecture, standardised engineering practices, and governed AI adoption.

Role Overview:
We are seeking a Chief Engineer to lead the technical strategy, architecture, and engineering standards across Finance and Risk technology platforms at CBA. This role is responsible for ensuring our systems are resilient, secure, compliant, and scalable, while supporting critical regulatory, financial reporting, and risk management capabilities.

You will act as the senior-most technical authority across Finance & Risk domains, driving modernisation of legacy platforms, uplifting engineering practices, and ensuring alignment with CBA’s enterprise architecture, risk frameworks, and regulatory obligations.

As part of this role, you will:

• Define and lead the technology strategy, target architecture and engineering standards across Finance & Risk platforms.

• Drive platform modernisation through cloud adoption, simplification and legacy system retirement.

• Ensure platforms align with enterprise architecture, data strategy and engineering standards.

• Drive modern architecture patterns including API-first, event-driven and modular platform design.

• Provide technical leadership across software engineering, data platforms, AI integration, responsible AI adoption, cybersecurity and operational resilience.

• Establish engineering practices that improve reliability, observability, availability, disaster recovery and incident management.

• Ensure data platforms, controls and governance processes deliver accurate, consistent and trusted data, supported by strong lineage, reconciliation and quality controls.

• Promote modern engineering capabilities including CI/CD, automated testing, release governance and secure software development practices.

• Lead and mentor Principal Engineers and engineering leaders while fostering a culture of accountability, technical excellence and continuous improvement.

• Partner with senior leaders across Finance, Risk, Treasury and Technology to deliver strategic, regulatory and transformation outcomes.

• Support executive and board-level discussions on technology, resilience, risk and transformation matters.

• Influence hiring, capability development and workforce strategy to strengthen engineering excellence across the organisation.

We’re interested in hearing from people who have:

• Extensive engineering experience within large-scale enterprise environments.

• Proven experience leading complex business technology platforms and driving technology strategy at scale.

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP), platform engineering, and data technologies.

• A strong track record of leading large-scale transformation and modernisation initiatives.

• Experience operating within highly regulated environments and managing technology risk effectively.

• Experience working within regulated environments (APRA, Basel frameworks, etc.)

• Exceptional stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence senior executives and technical leaders.

• Experience building and leading high-performing engineering teams and developing technical leadership capability.

Desirable Experience

• Experience working with Finance, Treasury, Risk or Regulatory Reporting platforms.

• Experience with BCBS 239, capital, liquidity or regulatory reporting frameworks.

• Background in data architecture, data governance or enterprise data platforms.

• Familiarity with credit risk, market risk or model risk systems.

• Experience delivering platform engineering, cloud transformation or core banking modernisation initiatives.

Success in this role looks like:

• Finance & Risk platforms are resilient, reliable, secure and scalable.

• Legacy complexity and technical debt are reduced through modern architecture and engineering practices.

• Finance and risk data is trusted, well-governed and readily available for business, audit and regulatory reporting.

• Data quality, lineage, reconciliation and control outcomes are strengthened across critical platforms and processes.

• Regulatory, audit and strategic initiatives are delivered faster and with lower delivery risk.

• Engineering standards and practices are consistently adopted across teams, improving quality, productivity and operational stability.

• Teams demonstrate increased engineering maturity, stronger technical capability and improved talent retention.

• Technology and data are recognised as trusted strategic enablers of Finance & Risk outcomes.