Principal Software Engineer

The Opportunity This is a role for a visionary technical leader who operates as a strategic force multiplier for the entire engineering organization. As a Principal Platform Engineer (SDE4) at NAB, you will be responsible for setting the long-term technical vision for critical domains of our engineering platform. You will tackle our most complex and ambiguous challenges, pioneering innovative solutions that advance the state-of-the-art for financial technology at scale. Your influence will extend far beyond the Platform Engineering & Developer Experience teams; you will collaborate with senior technology leaders, establish engineering standards, and mentor other senior engineers, shaping the technical fabric of the bank. If you are driven by the challenge of solving large-scale distributed systems problems and have a passion for creating an environment where hundreds of engineers can thrive, this is your platform to make a lasting impact. What You'll Do As a SDE4, your focus will be on strategy, architecture, and technical leadership, driving the long-term success and scalability of the NAB Engineering Foundation. Define Technical Vision and Strategy: Define and own the long-term technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for critical platform domains, such as our enterprise container platform, multi-cloud infrastructure strategy, or core developer experience. Your work will set the direction for years to come. Architect for the Future: Lead the architectural design of complex, cross-functional platform solutions. You will ensure these systems are secure, compliant, highly scalable, and cost-effective, anticipating future business needs and technological shifts. Solve Ambiguous, Large-Scale Problems: Tackle the most technically challenging and ill-defined problems within the platform space. This involves deep-dive analysis, prototyping, and creating novel solutions that push the boundaries of what's possible. Champion Engineering Excellence: Act as a steward for engineering quality across the orgs. You will establish and evangelize best practices, author design documents and RFCs, and lead by example to cultivate a culture of high-performance engineering. Mentor and Elevate Senior Talent: Serve as a mentor and technical guide to other senior engineers (SDE3s) and team leads. You will be a "force multiplier," elevating the technical capabilities of the entire organization through your guidance and expertise. Collaborate with Senior Leadership: Partner with senior technology leaders (Heads of Engineering) to align the platform strategy with NAB's overarching business and technology objectives, ensuring your work delivers maximum strategic value. What You'll Bring We are seeking a world-class engineer with a history of strategic impact and a reputation for technical excellence and thought leadership. Experience: 9+ years of experience in software and platform engineering, with significant time spent in a technical leadership, staff, or principal engineer capacity. Distributed Systems Mastery: Deep, recognized expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems on multi-cloud platforms (AWS and Google Cloud / Azure). Cloud-Native Authority: Mastery of Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem. You have architected and operated Kubernetes platforms at enterprise scale, likely in complex, multi-tenant environments, and have a profound understanding of its internals. Strategic Influence: Proven ability to drive large-scale, cross-team technical initiatives from conception through to production. You are adept at building consensus and influencing technical direction without direct authority. Exceptional Communication: World-class communication and interpersonal skills. You can crisply articulate highly complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from junior engineers to executive leadership. Visionary Mindset: A strategic thinker who can look beyond immediate problems to anticipate future challenges and opportunities, translating them into a coherent technical strategy. AI Innovation: Lead organizational AI platform strategy and GenAI technology adoption. Design intelligent platforms with autonomous capabilities and predictive operations, like developer agents, code review agents, test agents, SRE agents etc. Multi-Cloud architecture & Strategy: You have experience in designing and architecting, multi-cloud / cross-cloud-platform systems, and defining clear strategies for maintaining multi-cloud infrastructure at scale. Risk & Security: As part of being a banking / financial institution, security and risk in ingrained in our daily activity. A key competency would be not just building great tech but also building with the best practices of security & risk ingrained in our decisions and strategies. Good to Have These qualifications indicate a candidate operating at the forefront of the industry: Demonstrable experience in defining and implementing AI-driven platform capabilities. Active contributions to open-source projects within the cloud-native, infrastructure, or observability space. Deep expertise with advanced deployment strategies (e.g., canary, blue-green) and modern continuous delivery platforms like Harness, especially in the context of highly regulated financial workloads. Published work, such as conference talks, blog posts, or whitepapers, on topics related to platform engineering, distributed systems, or cloud architecture.