Principal Software Engineer

At CommBank, we're building the future of digital commerce for Australian businesses.

As part of our continued investment in Payments & Acceptance, we're transforming our eCommerce platform following the acquisition of a leading payment service provider. We're bringing critical capabilities in-house and building the next generation of merchant onboarding, payment processing, settlement, and customer-facing experiences.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership across multiple engineering squads and help define the future architecture of one of the bank's most strategic growth platforms.

This is an opportunity to influence technology at scale, shape engineering direction across a rapidly growing organisation, and help build products that power the digital commerce experiences of Australian businesses.

You'll join Business Banking Technology's Payments & Acceptance domain, a fast-growing engineering organisation responsible for delivering modern eCommerce capabilities for business customers.

Our teams own critical capabilities including:

• Merchant onboarding and activation
• Payment transaction processing
• Settlement and reconciliation
• eCommerce platform services
• Customer and merchant experiences

With multiple squads delivering a major multi-phase platform transformation, we're looking for a Principal Engineer who can connect the dots across teams, establish technical direction, and ensure we're building a scalable, resilient platform for the future.

Working alongside senior engineering leaders, architects, product leaders and engineering managers, you'll provide technical leadership across the domain while remaining close enough to delivery to influence outcomes where it matters most.

• Define and evolve the technical vision for our eCommerce Payments platform.
• Drive architectural decisions across multiple squads and products.
• Ensure solutions align with long-term scalability, reliability, security, and operability goals.
• Guide platform evolution as we modernise and replace legacy vendor-managed capabilities with in-house solutions.

• Provide technical leadership across merchant onboarding, payment processing, settlement, and customer experience teams.
• Identify opportunities for platform reuse, simplification, and standardisation.
• Resolve complex cross-domain engineering challenges.
• Influence engineering roadmaps and investment decisions.

• Establish and champion engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Drive improvements in quality, observability, automation, reliability, and operational maturity.
• Lead technical reviews and architecture governance activities.
• Ensure teams can deliver independently while maintaining platform consistency.

• Mentor Staff Engineers and senior engineers across the organisation.
• Build engineering capability through coaching, technical leadership, and knowledge sharing.
• Partner with product, architecture, and business stakeholders to align technology strategy with customer outcomes.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership.

• Significant experience leading large-scale software platforms and distributed systems.
• Proven success driving technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in modern cloud-native architectures and engineering practices.
• Strong experience balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term platform evolution.
• A track record of influencing senior stakeholders and leading through technical credibility rather than authority.
• Experience building reusable platforms, shared services, or organisation-wide engineering capabilities.

Payments experience is highly regarded but not essential. We're open to Principal Engineers who have successfully led complex engineering organisations and large-scale platform transformations in other domains.

We don't expect expertise in every technology we use, but we're interested in leaders with strong experience across modern software engineering ecosystems.

• Java
• Spring Boot
• Distributed systems
• RESTful APIs
• Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
• Event-driven architectures

Highly regarded:

• React
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• Modern web application architectures

• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or CloudFormation)
• CI/CD and automated delivery

• Kafka
• EventBridge
• SNS/SQS
• Relational and NoSQL databases

• Observability and monitoring
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Resilience engineering
• Security and DevSecOps

• Shape the architecture of one of Australia's largest eCommerce payments platforms.
• Influence multiple squads and engineering teams.
• Work on strategic technology initiatives with executive visibility.
• Help build and scale new products from the ground up.
• Partner with exceptional engineers solving complex problems at enterprise scale.
• Leave a lasting technical legacy across a rapidly growing engineering organisation.

If this sounds like you, apply today!