Principal Engineer

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Principal Engineer - Cloud & PlatformsApply locations Richmond, Melbourne VIC time type Full time posted on Posted 6 Days Ago job requisition id R0013899

• Be the technical authority and strategic guide for a significant portion of our cloud ecosystem
• Join an organisation with a thriving culture centred around high performance and care

We're REA

With bold and ambitious goals, REA Group is changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step - whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we're proud to have been named in Australia's "Top 5" Best Workplaces two years in a row, as well as being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women.

Where the team fits in

Launchpad is REA's central platform engineering group, the engine behind our engineering culture. Our mission is to create seamless tech experiences and engaging environments that accelerate innovation across the entire company. We empower hundreds of engineers by providing the foundational platforms, expert guidance, and developer tooling they need to build, run, and operate software with speed and confidence.

We treat our platforms as products, with our fellow engineers as our customers. This means we are obsessed with reducing their cognitive load and creating paved roads that make it simple to do the right thing. As a collective, we provide the capabilities, guardrails and expertise necessary to help achieve our goal of becoming the #1 Tech Company.

What the role is all about

As a Principal Engineer, you are the technical authority and strategic guide for a significant portion of our cloud ecosystem. Collaborating with technology leaders across the business, you will translate REA's overarching technology strategy into tangible architectural designs and roadmaps for your domain. While your primary focus is on architecture and setting the standard for technical excellence, this is a deeply hands-on role. You will embed with teams to prototype solutions, contribute critical code, and solve their most complex engineering challenges using agile practices.

Your influence will be key in aligning technical direction across multiple Engineering Managers (EMs) and Senior Engineering Managers (SEMs), guiding the work of 3-6 engineering squads. You'll champion our engineering practices to ensure robust and high-quality outcomes and play a crucial role in product discovery by providing early solution validation to steer impactful innovation.

What success looks like:

• Define and Champion Strategy:You will author and socialise a clear technology strategy for your domain, ensuring it directly supports business objectives and aligns with REA's overarching technology strategy.
• Oversee Technology Alignment:You will ensure that all technology solutions delivered within your domain are scalable, secure, and resilient, consistently adhering to our established strategy and architectural principles.
• Drive System Reliability & Health:You will lead the development and execution of actionable plans to proactively improve system health, observability, and reliability, using the REA System Health Framework to measure and report on progress.
• Elevate REA's Technical Brand:You will enhance REA's reputation as a technology thought leader through impactful external contributions, such as conference presentations, technical articles, or open-source projects

Who we're looking for

We're looking for an influential Principal Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with a strategic, collaborative mindset. We value your unique background and believe in potential as much as experience. If you don't tick every single box but are excited by the challenges of this role, we strongly encourage you to apply.

• Multi-Cloud & Core Infrastructure Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience designing, securing, and managing scalable infrastructure in a primary cloud platform (we are AWS-dominant), coupled with a strong aptitude and enthusiasm for working in a multi-cloud environment (AWS & GCP).
• Infrastructure as Code Mastery: A proven track record of authoring and governing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) at scale. Your expertise should span mainstream tools like Terraform and CloudFormation to create reusable modules, with hands-on experience or a keen interest in modern Kubernetes-native IaC such as Crossplane.
• Kubernetes & Containerisation Leadership: Significant experience with containerisation and orchestration, particularly in designing, operating, and evolving Kubernetes platforms (EKS and GKE) for critical production workloads.
• FinOps & Commercial Acumen: A strong commercial and cost-conscious mindset, with demonstrable experience implementing FinOps principles to manage, forecast, and optimize cloud spend effectively.
• Proven Platform Engineering Experience: A track record of building internal platform capabilities from the ground up. You excel at creating self-service tooling and APIs that improve the overall Developer Experience by freeing developers from the need to manage underlying infrastructure complexity.
• Proficiency in Automation & Tooling: Proficiency in a modern programming language for building robust automation and platform tooling. We primarily use Go, but value strong engineering fundamentals regardless of your preferred language.
• A Modernisation Driver: The ability to define and drive large-scale technical modernization initiatives, confidently leading the charge from initial strategy and business case through to successful execution.
• A Product Mindset: You treat infrastructure as a product. You are passionate about building internal platforms and tools that improve developer velocity, reliability, and satisfaction, with our engineers as your customers.
• A Mentor and Influencer: A natural ability to mentor and uplift other engineers, guiding technical decisions and fostering a culture of engineering excellence across multiple squads.
• An Innate Collaborator: Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from junior engineers to senior business leaders, building consensus and alignment along the way.
• A Growth Mindset: An inherent curiosity and passion for continuous learning. You actively seek out new challenges, technologies, and ways of working, and you enjoy sharing that knowledge with others.

The REA experience

The physical, mental, emotional and financial health of our people is something we'll never stop caring about. This is a place to learn and grow.

Some of our Perks & Benefits include:

• A hybrid and flexible approach to working
• Flexible leave options including, birthday leave and purchase additional leave
• Flexible parental leave offering for primary and secondary carers
• Our Because We Care program offers employees volunteering leave, community grants, matched payroll giving and our Community Café donates 100% of revenue to charity
• Hackdays so you can bring your big ideas to life

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We are committed to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe teams with diverse ideas and experiences are more creative, more effective and fuel disruptive thinking. If you've got the skills, dedication and enthusiasm to learn but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch.

Join our Talent Neighbourhood

Keen to be part of REA but didn't find a perfect match with this opportunity? Perhaps the timing isn't right? You should join our Talent Neighbourhood

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Our leading brand is Australia's biggest property resource, realestate.com.au. We also operate the number one commercial property site, realcommercial.com.au, and have businesses that help property developers and other brands advertise with us. Whilst we live in Australia, we've also got ventures in Asia and North America, and have the vision of expanding our footprint further. Everything we do is driven by our purpose to 'change the way the world experiences property' – from product innovation to our international investments.

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