Woolworths

Principal Engineer 

• Sydney based role with Hybrid working

• Help drive AI-centric implementation

• Define the re-architecture of of one of our key products

We are Woolworths Group

We are Woolworths Group. 200,000+ bright minds, passionate hearts and unique perspectives connected by a shared Purpose – ‘to create better experiences together for a better tomorrow. It’s that Purpose that fuels our ambition to explore new ideas, make brave commitments and innovate better ways to meet the food and everyday needs of more than 24 million customers every week.

If you’re excited to turn today’s blue sky thinking into a better tomorrow for future generations, you’ll find yourself supported and enriched in a dynamic, inclusive and empowering workplace that reflects the diverse communities we serve. With a culture of genuine care, a flexible approach to work and opportunities across the group to grow your career and make a meaningful impact, the possibilities for what we can achieve together are endless.

What you'll do

We seek a Principal Engineer to be the technical leader for the Everyday Rewards tribe, directing engineering across multiple squads while staying involved in day-to-day delivery. This is not purely strategic. You will directly engage with squads on difficult issues: guiding integration design, reviewing solutions, unblocking challenges, and advising on complex distributed systems tradeoffs. You will also identify cross-squad patterns, enforce standards, and drive consistency to enable fast, cost-effective tribe movement. The role requires both architectural vision for future direction and deep engineering credibility for practical details.

• Own and evolve the architectural runway for the Everyday Rewards tribe, defining target-state architecture and managing pragmatic delivery steps.

• Serve as the primary technical reference point, providing hands-on guidance on solution design, implementation tradeoffs, and engineering practices across squads.

• Drive tactical solutioning for complex problems, including partner integrations, loyalty processing, real-time event pipelines, and customer-facing digital experiences.

• Identify and address cross-squad technical concerns (consistency, shared components, standards, technical debt) with a delivery-aware lens.

• Establish and continuously improve engineering standards (testing, observability, CI/CD, secure-by-design) and produce fit-for-purpose solution architectures.

What you’ll bring

A minimum 10 + years experiences a engineer with most recent as a Principal Engineer, Senior Technical Architect, or Senior Tech Lead — ideally with an eCommerce, loyalty, or high-volume consumer platform background

• Strong technical skills in .NET (C#, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, Entity Framework), Graph QL and Node.js.

• Extensive cloud platform experience (GCP/Azure) and familiarity with containerisation (Kubernetes/Docker Swarm).

• Expertise in DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and delivery automation.

• Experience with web security (OWASP Top 10), microservice architectures, NoSQL databases, and event messaging/queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Event Hubs).

• Proven ability to influence multiple teams, raise engineering standards, and facilitate team growth.

What You’ll Experience

• We embrace diversity of thought and love to take on challenges with a pragmatic and innovative approach. Our culture thrives on mutual respect, care, curiosity, openness, and a proactive attitude. We continually seek ways to pair, collaborate, support, and learn from each other as a team!

• Team discounts across our range of Woolworths Group brands you know and love and a robust rewards program that celebrates and incentivises purpose-driven work.

• A global business with endless career possibilities around every corner and across every discipline – with valuable exposure to a vast and exciting business network.

• A progressive and flexible ‘work from anywhere' policy that gives you the opportunity to harmonise work, life and your wellbeing.

• A range of programs to help you prioritise and manage your wellbeing, including 24/7 access to the Sonder app.