Position: Principal Engineer, Data New

Make an impact as a technical leader in an exciting data focused space

Join a collaborative, supportive team and solve interesting problems

Permanent full time role based in Richmond

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

The Principal Engineer, Data will join the FS Engineering Leadership Team, which is within our Product & Technology team located in our Financial Services business (serving the Mortgage Choice & PropTrack brands). Our purpose is to offer home finance and other financial services to those using mortgagechoice.com.au & realestate.com.au for their property search. Given the opportunity of the size of that audience, the FS vision is to integrate a consumer’s property search with finance though a world class digital seamless process. This will be achieved by building innovative consumer search and property finance application experiences that integrate the mortgage distribution channels of digital, phone and face to face.

FS is evolving how it leverages data and technology to deliver benefits for customers, we are now looking for an experienced data obsessed Principal Engineer to re-imagine our data foundations for the next stage of growth.

What the role is all about

- Actively participate in defining a clear data architecture and engineering strategy for your area by collaborating with Architects, Directors of Engineering, Engineering Managers, and Data Governance stakeholders.
- Partner with Engineering Managers to ensure all data‑related technical solutions are delivered in alignment with the agreed strategy, architectural principles, and compliance obligations.
- Develop and lead actionable plans to improve the health, resilience, and integrity of data pipelines and platforms across the domain.
- Promote exploration and assessment of emerging data technologies, practices, and patterns to maintain REA’s strength in data architecture and engineering.
- Design high-quality, cross-squad, data-centric solutions in collaboration with a diverse set of stakeholders, ensuring interoperability across systems in the value chain.
- Foster a connected internal data engineering and architecture community, encouraging knowledge‑sharing, technical excellence, and alignment across squads.
- Engage externally to share expertise and showcase REA’s leadership in data engineering and innovation, further building the organisation’s reputation.
- You’ll be responsible for aligning data strategies and technical approaches across Engineering Managers (EMs) and Senior Engineering Managers (SEMs), influencing the data‑related direction for 3–6 squads operating at different points along our value chain. You will actively ensure product strategy and data strategy alignment, and engage early in product discovery to validate solutions, shaping innovations that unlock new insights and capabilities while meeting regulatory obligations.
- Coach and mentor experienced engineers, enabling the growth of future technical leaders in data engineering and architecture within your domain.

Who we’re looking for

- 8+ years of experience in the data engineering space, with a focus on data pipelines, analytics, data services or related fields.
- Experience in the mortgage or financial services industry is a plus.
- Practical data related AI capability & similarly HubSpot/CRM design/build would be beneficial.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Business, or a related field. A master's degree is a plus.
- Expertise in building data intensive applications and large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep understanding of modern data architectures, batch and stream processing pipelines, and event-driven systems leveraging Kafka and Pub/Sub.
- Experienced in designing and optimising ETL workflows, data warehousing, and multi cloud architecture (AWS and GCP).
- Strong analytical, creative and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to effectively convey complex concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A deep understanding of customer needs and a passion for creating data products that drive customer value.
- Demonstrated growth mindset.
- Work productively in a fast paced and agile environment.

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.

- 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.

Like a lot of companies, we have perps out there who like to ‘phish’ and have had a few recent instances of people pretending to be from REA and making offers of employment, on the condition that they transfer money for security checks.

Find out more about our tech teams who build products that millions of people use every day.

Our corporate headquarters in Melbourne is a bright open space, open to possibilities.

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