Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer – Retail Digital

You are passionate about building secure, resilient, and always-available digital platforms that power critical customer experiences. You thrive on solving complex problems, uplifting engineering standards, and influencing technical direction across large, multi-team environments.

Do work that matters

We’re on a mission to transform tomorrow’s bank today. Retail Digital is responsible for CBA’s customer-facing digital channels and journeys, spanning digital money management, onboarding, payments, rewards, and personalised communications. Our platforms support millions of customers every day and are foundational to how Australians interact with the bank.

As a Principal Engineer in Retail Digital, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping how we design, build, and operate our digital platforms. This role will initially support the Digital Payments value stream, while operating with a broader Retail Digital mindset and influence across domains.

See yourself in our team

You’ll work within Retail Digital, collaborating across multiple value streams and platform teams. Your primary focus will be supporting Digital Payments, working closely with squads that deliver domestic and international transfers, address book management, payment limits, customer verification flows, and step-up security experiences.

The Digital Payments value stream is responsible for the customer-facing payment journeys across mobile and web, orchestrating interactions with identity, fraud, and core payments platforms to ensure payments are secure, fast, and reliable. The teams focus on availability, resilience, and customer trust, while continuously modernising platforms and improving engineering standards.

You’ll also partner closely with Identity, Fraud, Platform, and Core Banking teams to ensure seamless, end-to-end customer experiences.

What you’ll do

• Provide technical leadership and architectural direction across Retail Digital, with a focus on the Digital Payments value stream

• Design and evolve decoupled, resilient, and secure digital solutions supporting critical customer journeys

• Drive cross-team integration, particularly across identity, fraud, platform, and payments capabilities

• Be hands-on, contributing to complex backend and full-stack engineering challenges

• Uplift engineering practices including testing, CI/CD, observability, deployment safety, and reliability

• Embed risk and security considerations from the earliest stages of design and development

• Mentor and coach engineers, strengthening engineering craft and technical capability across teams

What we’re looking for

We’re interested in hearing from people who have:

• Proven experience delivering large-scale, customer-facing digital platforms in complex or regulated environments

• Strong full-stack engineering experience, with a bias toward backend systems and integration

• Experience designing and operating microservices within a DevSecOps environment

• A pragmatic, commercially minded approach to modernising legacy systems and managing technical debt

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy and execution across teams without formal authority

• Experience designing solutions that orchestrate end-to-end customer journeys across multiple services

• The confidence to challenge the status quo while building trust with engineers, product, and senior stakeholders

Exposure to AI-enabled systems, intelligent orchestration, or agent-based architectures is highly regarded.

Skills & technologies

We use a broad range of tools, languages, and frameworks. You don’t need to know them all, but experience with some of the following will set you up for success:

• Backend & Full Stack: Any of these- .NET Core / C#, Java, Node.js

• Frontend (desirable): React, TypeScript, Next.js

• Data: SQL and NoSQL databases

• DevOps & CI/CD: GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Octopus

• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, SST

• Quality & Reliability: Automated testing, monitoring, and operational readiness

• Security: Encryption, identity, authentication, and secure design principles

If this sounds like you, apply today!

Working with us

At CBA, we’re building a diverse, inclusive, and flexible workplace where engineers can do meaningful work at scale. We live our values of Care, Courage, and Commitment, and we invest in developing engineering leaders who raise the bar for the whole organisation.