Principal Software Engineer - Financial Crime Detection

About the role

CommBank is looking for a Principal Software Engineer within its EC Technology team, which builds the detection, investigation and data capabilities that protect customers and keep financial crime out of the bank. The role sets the technical direction for platforms that detect and investigate financial crime, shapes domain-wide architecture and advances shared platforms, modern cloud engineering and responsible AI. It sits in Sydney CBD.

Key responsibilities

• Own the domain's technical strategy, including architecture direction, platform choices and build-versus-reuse decisions.
• Drive consolidation and decommissioning, reduce system and pipeline duplication and establish reusable golden paths.
• Scale platforms from minimum viable products into resilient, highly available, enterprise-ready services.
• Set engineering standards across CI/CD, testing, observability, operational readiness and security.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across the stack, guiding scalable services, well-designed APIs, backend-for-frontend layers and internal interfaces.
• Define reliable, observable and responsible approaches to AI and agentic systems with appropriate human oversight.
• Embed regulatory, control, security and privacy considerations into engineering decisions from the start.
• Mentor senior engineers and lift engineering capability through influence, technical leadership and hands-on contribution.

Required profile

• Full-stack software engineering experience, able to influence teams without formal authority.
• Experience designing and operating production services and APIs at scale with a modern typed language such as Python, Java, Kotlin or Go.
• Experience with platform strategy, reusable capabilities, legacy-system modernisation, event-driven integration, observability, security-first engineering or reliable AI and agentic systems.
• Cloud-native experience focused on high availability and operational excellence.

Required skills

• Algorithms, data structures, concurrency and distributed-systems design.
• REST, OpenAPI, API gateways or equivalent.
• React and TypeScript or equivalent, plus backend-for-frontend layers.
• AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions or ArgoCD.