Woolworths

Principal Engineer

• Sydney based role with hybrid working

• Drive innovation across our technical capabilities 

• Surry Hills office location, right next to Central and public transport

We are Cartology

Cartology is one of Australia’s leading retail media businesses, powered by the Woolworths Group. We provide targeted omnichannel marketing solutions and comprehensive closed loop reporting to help brands grow. With Cartology, brands can drive real customer impact across the shopper journey. 

Cartology is truly pioneering the future of Retail Media, creating, shaping and leading this new industry that connects brands to customers in new and exciting ways.

Be nothing but yourself in a culture that is inclusive and innovative. Work as part of an ambitious, smart and passionate team and belong to something meaningful as part of the Woolworths Group. 

What you'll do

We are looking for a Principal Developer to serve as a technical beacon for our engineering organization. You will be responsible for the architectural integrity, scalability, and developer experience of our core platforms. This is a role for a systems thinker who excels at solving "impossible" distributed systems problems while maintaining a pragmatic focus on product delivery.You will lead the adoption of modern workflow orchestration (Temporal.io), drive our JVM-based service strategy, and ensure our cloud-native infrastructure on GCP is world-class.

• Architectural Stewardship: Design and evolve complex, event-driven architectures that support high-scale data processing and reliable business logic.

• Workflow Orchestration: Act as the subject matter expert for distributed message oriented architectures, designing resilient, long-running processes and educating the wider team on stateful workflow patterns.

• Technical Excellence (JVM & Beyond): Set the "gold standard" for development in Kotlin and Java, ensuring services are performant, observable, and maintainable.

• Full-Stack Bridge: Provide guidance on the integration between robust JVM backends and modern React/TypeScript frontends, ensuring a seamless and typed end-to-end developer experience.

• Infrastructure & DX: Standardize and optimize our GCP environment (GKE, Postgres, BigQuery) and lead the maturation of our CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions.

• Technical Mentorship: Spend significant time "in the trenches" with senior engineers, conducting high-impact code reviews and pair programming on the most critical system components.

• Strategy & Influence: Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to define technical roadmaps that balance feature velocity with long-term platform stability.

What You’ll Bring

Bringing 10+ years in software engineering, with recent experience in a "Principal," "Staff," or "Technical Lead" capacity within a high-growth SaaS or product-led company.You have a track record of elevating the engineers around you. You lead by example and through influence rather than authority.

• JVM Mastery: Deep expertise in Kotlin and/or Java. You understand the nuances of the JVM, concurrency models, and modern frameworks (Micronaut, Spring Boot, or Ktor).

• Frontend Fluency: Strong proficiency in TypeScript and React. You understand how to build scalable UI components and manage complex state.

• Distributed Systems & Messaging: Expert-level knowledge of Message-Oriented Architectures. Temporal.io experience would be highly prized, but knowledge of Pub/Sub, Kafka, Cadence, Airflow or equivalent will also be recognised.

• Cloud Native (GCP): Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, specifically Kubernetes (GKE), Cloud SQL (postgres), and leveraging BigQuery for data-driven insights.

• DevOps Mindset: Proponent of "you build it, you run it." Expert in Git and automating complex delivery workflows with GitHub Actions.

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.