Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer – Financial Crime Technology

• Sydney/Melbourne location*
• You’re a deeply technical engineering leader who thrives on solving high-stakes, complex problems.
• We’re modernising critical financial crime platforms and building cloud-native, AI-enabled systems that protect millions of Australians.
• Together we can help disrupt sophisticated criminal networks and strengthen the integrity of Australia’s financial system.
  
  

Do work that matters

Nearly half of all Australian transactions flow through our systems.

Within Corporate Technology, we are rebuilding and modernising the platforms that power fraud detection, financial crime prevention, regulatory operations and risk systems across Retail, Commercial and Institutional Banking.

This is a multi-year transformation — moving from legacy monolithic systems to modern, cloud-native architectures, while scaling machine learning models and real-time intelligence systems to production.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll:

• Lead the design and build of secure, scalable distributed systems
• Drive cloud modernisation across mission-critical platforms
• Productionise machine learning models at scale
• Influence architecture across multiple crews
• Raise the engineering bar across the domain
  
  

This is a hands-on, deeply technical and highly influential.

See yourself in the team

Corporate Technology is the operational engine room of CBA — supporting regulatory operations, risk, compliance and fulfilment across the Group.

The Financial Crime domain is one of the bank’s most strategically invested areas. We are building:

• Real-time threat detection systems
• AI-driven economic crime identification
• Highly observable, secure and resilient platforms
• Data-intensive systems that are among the largest consumers of data in the bank
  
  

You’ll work alongside Distinguished and Chief Engineers, partnering across six specialised crews spanning cloud, ML, analytics and user experience.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and build cloud-native systems (AWS) supporting fraud and financial crime detection
• Lead greenfield platform builds while pragmatically modernising legacy systems
• Guide teams (6–8 engineers) through full lifecycle delivery
• Embed secure-by-design and DevSecOps practices from day one
• Scale machine learning models into reliable, production-grade systems
• Collaborate across data, AI and platform engineering teams
• Mentor engineers and uplift engineering standards across crews
  
  

What Will Set You Apart

We’re looking for engineers who:

• Have built and operated large-scale distributed systems in production
• Have strong AWS cloud expertise and understand modern infrastructure patterns
• Have experience productionising AI/ML models (not just building prototypes)- Highly regarded
• Are comfortable balancing technical debt with strategic evolution
• Can influence across domains and secure alignment on technical direction
  
  

We use a broad range of tools, languages, and frameworks. We don’t expect you to know them all — but experience or exposure to some of these (or equivalents) will set you up for success: 

• Experience building scalable, high-performance, and secure APIs
• Solid experience building backend applications using Java or .NET or Python or Golang (or any other similar languages).
• Hands-on experience developing and scaling full-stack applications using modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks such as React, Next.js, Node.js, and NestJS. 
• Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS. 
• Familiarity with full-cycle engineering, including test automation (unit, integration, and end-to-end tests). 
• Proficiency with relational databases (SQL) and NoSQL databases such as AWS DocumentDB. 
  
  

Why this role is different

• You’ll work on systems that directly protect victims of financial crime
• You’ll operate at national scale
• You’ll influence architecture in one of the bank’s most critical domains
• You’ll partner with senior technical leaders across the Group
• Your work will blend greenfield innovation with high-stakes operational resilience
  
  

Apply today!

We support our people with the flexibility to balance where work is done with at least half their time each month connecting in office.

If you're already part of the Commonwealth Bank Group (including Bankwest, x15ventures), you'll need to apply through Sidekick to submit a valid application. We’re keen to support you with the next step in your career.

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Advertising End Date: 15/05/2026