Chief Engineer - Customer Service Direct

About the role

CommBank's Retail Technology team is looking for a Chief Engineer to lead technology strategy and engineering excellence within Customer Service Direct, which covers contact centres, collections, direct lending and customer assistance. The role defines the technology foundations and engineering direction for modern, resilient and AI-enabled experiences, working across customer-service platforms, voice, messaging, customer context, journey orchestration and Agentic AI.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical direction and build a culture of engineering excellence, innovation and pragmatic delivery
• Shape architectural roadmaps across customer service, including how digital, assisted and AI-enabled experiences work together
• Lead modernisation of legacy and future-state platforms, reducing technical debt while keeping critical services running
• Establish reusable service domains, APIs, events and engineering patterns across the Group
• Develop common foundations for customer context, journey orchestration, voice, messaging, knowledge and Agentic AI experiences
• Drive modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, observability, secure design and production readiness
• Build resilience, reliability, security and operational risk management into services from the start
• Mentor senior engineers and influence leaders across product, architecture, cyber and risk

Required profile

• A deeply technical, hands-on engineering leader who connects customer and business outcomes with sound technology choices
• Strong architectural judgement and confidence in complex production environments, able to move between long-term strategy and detailed problem solving
• Ideally: experience leading technology strategy, architecture and engineering in large-scale enterprise settings
• Ideally: a record of modernising complex technology estates and communicating technical decisions to senior stakeholders
• Ideally: experience designing resilient, highly available systems with security, observability and risk controls
• Ideally: ability to guide solution design and set architecture guardrails for autonomous engineering teams
• Ideally: understanding of Agentic AI and generative AI opportunities and challenges
• Ideally: mentoring and communication skills to build alignment and grow technical leaders

Required skills

• Contemporary software architecture: cloud platforms, distributed systems, domain-based design, APIs, events or microservices
• Modern delivery practices: automation, secure engineering, CI/CD, quality at scale
• Resilient, highly available system design