Job Description

Principal Data Engineer – Contract

Sydney or Melbourne, Australia
Contract • Full-time • Principal / Staff level

Our black belt specialists are leaders in their domains: digital champions, delivery-focused experts, top-tier security professionals, AI thought leaders, and engineering best practice advocates.

With a global footprint and deep local insight, Software at Scale delivers cutting-edge technology solutions that power mission-critical platforms. We solve complex engineering challenges at scale, driving quality, performance and resilience through the strength of our people.

Empower Your Career

We’re seeking a Principal Data Engineer to provide technical leadership across enterprise-scale data platforms for a major financial institution.

This is a high-impact role working on the evolution of large, complex and highly governed data platforms that underpin critical customer, operational, regulatory and AI-enabled experiences. You will help shape the future of how data is produced, governed, consumed and operated at scale.

The role suits a deeply technical, hands-on engineering leader who can operate across architecture, platform evolution, delivery, governance and senior stakeholder engagement. You’ll work across modern cloud-native data platforms, large-scale migrations, enterprise data products, lineage, observability and controls-by-design in a complex regulated environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise Data Platform Leadership: Provide end-to-end technical leadership across enterprise data platforms, shaping architecture, engineering standards and long-term platform evolution.
• Target-State Architecture: Lead the design and evolution of modern, scalable and cloud-native data platforms that support high-volume, business-critical and near-real-time data use cases.
• Large-Scale Data Migration: Own and guide major data platform migrations, including legacy warehouse modernisation, pipeline rationalisation and transition to modern data platform patterns.
• Engineering Standards: Define and uplift standards across ingestion, transformation, data quality, lineage, observability, security, privacy, controls and operational resilience.
• Platform Stabilisation and Scalability: Improve performance, reliability, resilience and production readiness across enterprise-grade data services and supporting platforms.
• Enterprise Data Products: Establish and uplift data product patterns, semantic models and consumption standards in partnership with domain, product and platform teams.
• Governance and Controls-by-Design: Embed strong governance, auditability, lineage and operational controls into platform and data engineering practices.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with product, risk, architecture, delivery and engineering leaders to balance platform stabilisation, delivery priorities and forward-looking innovation.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders, lifting data engineering capability and helping shape the next generation of engineering leadership.
• Build-and-Transfer Mindset: Create clear technical documentation, patterns, standards, runbooks and decision records that enable long-term ownership by internal engineering teams.

What You Bring

• 
  Proven experience operating at Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer or equivalent technical leadership level
• 
  Deep hands-on experience designing, building and evolving enterprise-scale data platforms in complex, regulated or large enterprise environments.
• 
  Strong experience with cloud-native, distributed and event-driven data architectures
• 
  Demonstrated experience delivering major data migrations, warehouse modernisation or platform transformation programs
• 
  Strong understanding of data engineering patterns across ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data modelling, semantic layers and consumption.
• 
  Experience with production-grade data platform concerns including governance, lineage, observability, security, privacy, data quality, controls and operational risk
• 
  Ability to work across ambiguity, balancing immediate platform stabilisation with longer-term architectural direction.
• 
  Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence senior technology, product, risk and delivery leaders.
• 
  A strong engineering mindset with a focus on quality, resilience, scalability, automation and operational excellence.
• 
  A passion for mentoring engineers, uplifting standards and building high-performing technical teams.

Highly Regarded

• 
  Experience in banking, financial services, insurance, payments, telecommunications or other highly regulated enterprise environments.
• 
  Experience with modern cloud data platforms and services across AWS, Azure or GCP.
• 
  Exposure to data marketplaces, enterprise data products, data mesh patterns or governed self-service data consumption.
• 
  Experience supporting AI, machine learning, analytics or regulatory reporting use cases through well-governed enterprise data foundations.
• 
  Strong understanding of modern DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and automated testing practices for data platforms.

What We Offer

• 
  Meaningful, hands-on engineering leadership across complex, enterprise-grade data platforms.
• 
  The opportunity to work on high-impact platforms that support critical customer, operational, regulatory and AI-enabled outcomes.
• 
  A low-ceremony, delivery-focused environment that values engineers who own outcomes.
• 
  The opportunity to work alongside highly experienced engineers, architects and delivery leaders.
• 
  Competitive contract remuneration.
• 
  Sydney or Melbourne based engagement with hybrid working arrangements.

Apply Now

If you’re a Principal Data Engineer or senior technical leader who thrives on solving complex platform challenges at enterprise scale, we’d love to hear from you.