Principal Software Engineer (AI)
You are a problem solver with a strong background in software engineering.
We are a growing team within the bank and constantly involved in industry-changing solutions.
Together we will build tomorrow's bank today, using world-leading engineering, technology, and innovation.
Do work that matters
Join the Operational Risk & Compliance Crew to lead engineering for our core AI-enabled risk platforms. Your primary focus is hands-on, modern, reliable software engineering across .NET and Python on AWS, building secure APIs and microservices, uplifting CI/CD, and improving resilience and observability. You will drive the technical direction as we scale these platforms from MVP to enterprise-grade capability, embedding agentic AI into risk management processes that operate across the bank. Gen AI is a core enabler of the solutions you'll build. Data is a supporting concern, primarily consuming producer-led data products and event streams.
See yourself in our team
Risk Management is modernising how the bank identifies, assesses, and manages risk — building an enterprise-grade Risk AI Platform powered by an AWS-first approach, ArgoCD-managed deployments, and strong API standards. The platform underpins a growing portfolio of AI-enabled products that automate risk processes, embed agentic intelligence, and deliver scalable, human-in-the-loop workflows across Operational Risk & Compliance.
You will collaborate with Product Owners, Data Scientists, Risk Technology, and adjacent crews to extend the platform, deliver new AI-driven capabilities, reduce toil, and meet tech-control and privacy obligations. You'll be the technical lead within your squad — designing solutions, writing code, and providing engineering oversight to the team around you.
Key Responsibilities
Own engineering for Risk AI Platform services: design, build, and operate .NET/Python microservices and REST APIs with OpenAPI specs and Kong gateway integration.
Scale platforms from MVP to enterprise-grade: drive architectural refactors, modularisation, performance tuning, and reliability improvements as we transition from lean delivery to sustainable, scalable systems.
Provide hands-on technical leadership: write production code, conduct peer reviews, define engineering standards, and guide Staff and Senior engineers in solution design and delivery.
Establish golden paths for CI/CD (GitHub Actions + ArgoCD), automated testing (unit, integration, performance), and progressive delivery.
Embed observability and operability (Grafana, Prometheus, PagerDuty) with SLOs/SLIs and production readiness reviews.
Drive the integration of agentic AI capabilities: build and extend multi-agent architectures, conversational AI workflows, and Rules-as-Code frameworks that power intelligent risk assessments.
Apply knowledge of LLM APIs/platforms, agent frameworks (MCP, A2A), and planning/optimisation patterns to strengthen solution architecture and interoperability across the Risk AI ecosystem.
Partner with Product Owners, Data Scientists, and platform teams to plan increments, de-risk changes, and deliver measurable outcomes for risk operations.
Ensure compliance with Tech Controls and Privacy Front Door processes; champion secure coding, secrets management (SSO/RBAC, SailPoint), and encryption.
Consume producer-led data products (S3/Iceberg, Kafka) as inputs to platform features; avoid tight coupling to data storage layers.
We're interested in hearing from people who
Are curious, life-long learners who stay across emerging AI and engineering practices.
Can influence the future of the company's technology estate every day.
Can create a culture focused on accelerating the adoption of new and emerging technologies.
Thrive in ambiguity — you've scaled something from early-stage to enterprise before and know how to bring structure without slowing down.
Are passionate about using AI to solve real-world problems in risk management and governance.
Technical Skills:
We use a broad range of tools, languages, and frameworks. We don’t expect you to know them all but experience or exposure with some of these (or equivalents) will set you up for success in this team;
Deep software engineering expertise in .NET and/or Python, with a track record of building and operating production microservices and APIs at scale. Experience with FastAPI and REST/OpenAPI contract design is highly valued.
AI and agentic engineering experience particularly with agent orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangGraph), LLM gateway/proxy patterns (e.g. LiteLLM), prompt engineering, and AI evaluation/observability tooling (e.g. Langfuse, HoneyHive). You don't need to be a data scientist, but you understand how to engineer reliable, observable AI systems.
Modern frontend capability: experience with React, Next.js, and Node.js to build responsive, production-grade user interfaces and backend-for-frontend layers.
Strong AWS cloud experience: Hands-on with EKS (Kubernetes), DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, ALB, and EC2. You're comfortable designing for high availability across multiple availability zones.
Hands-on CI/CD and GitOps experience: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, containerisation (Docker, Helm/Kustomize), and automated testing strategies across unit, integration, and performance layers.
Observability and operational excellence: Experience building dashboards and alerting with Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, and ELK/Obstack, backed by SLOs/SLIs and production readiness reviews. Familiarity with PagerDuty for incident management.
A security-first mindset: familiarity with enterprise identity and access management (PingSSO/OIDC, SailPoint for RBAC), AWS Secrets Manager, and secure coding practices within a regulated environment.
Data consumption literacy: Experience working with event streams (Kafka), cloud-native data formats (S3/Iceberg), and NoSQL stores (DynamoDB) as a consumer of producer-led data products.
Strong architectural thinking: you can modularise a codebase, design API contracts, define integration patterns, and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and sustainability.
Proven ability to lead without authority: you elevate the engineers around you through code reviews, technical mentoring, and setting the standard for engineering excellence.
Working with us:
Our people bring their diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives to build a respectful, inclusive, and flexible workplace with flexible work locations. One where we’re driven by our values, and supported to share ideas, initiatives, and energy. One where making a positive impact for customers, communities and each other is part of our every day.
Here, you’ll thrive. You’ll be supported when faced with challenges and empowered to tackle new opportunities. We’re hiring engineers from across all of Australia and have opened technology hubs in Melbourne and Perth. We really love working here, and we think you will too.
We support our people with the flexibility to balance where work is done with at least half their time each month connecting in office. We also have many other flexible working options available including changing start and finish times, part-time arrangements and job share to name a few. Talk to us about how these arrangements might work in the role you’re interested in.
If this sounds like the role for you then we would love to hear from you. Apply today!
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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Sydney CBD Area, Australia
Onsite