Engineering Senior Manager

CommBank is recognised as leading the industry in IT and operations with its world-class platforms and processes, agile IT infrastructure, and innovation in everything from payments to internet banking and mobile apps. Our Software team are the brains behind Australia’s number one banking app, Netbank, Cardless Cash, Comm Sec Pocket and Spend Tracker. We go beyond a passion for web and mobile development, creating reliable APIs at a unique scale in Australia. And you could be a part of that journey.

Impact & Contribution:

The CBA technology unit delivers the best digital banking services to Commonwealth Bank customers and to do so is responsible for digital delivery, group data and analytics, technology and technology infrastructure, cyber, fraud, physical security and business resilience for all divisions across CBA. It is also dedicated to delivering the best workplace technology experience for our over 53.000 people across CBA and focused on providing the latest tools, technology, and resources to enhance the way we work together and empower our people to achieve more for our customers.

We are looking for an Engineering Senior Manager (Platform, Cloud & Backend Engineering) to lead the design, build and evolution of a greenfield, modern engineering platform and associated backend services.

This role is suited to an engineering leader with strong technical depth across cloud infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, distributed systems and modern Java-based backend architecture, combined with strong people leadership and delivery capability.

The primary technical emphasis of the role is Infrastructure, Cloud, DevOps, Platform Engineering and Java-based distributed systems. A secondary area of capability is Data Engineering, particularly around event-driven architectures, streaming, operational data flows and integration with modern analytical platforms.

The successful candidate will play a critical role in establishing the technical foundations, engineering practices, platform capabilities and team culture for a new technology landscape. The role will involve significantly more greenfield engineering than maintenance of legacy technologies.

This role will report into the Engineering Executive Manager under EBB Technology.

Roles & Responsibilities:

Build, lead and inspire an engaged, diverse team of Engineers, creating a culture of empowerment, autonomy, psychological safety, constructive challenge and continuous improvement.

Coach and develop Engineers through personalised feedback, mentoring and peer-to-peer learning, understanding individual skill sets and enabling ongoing career and capability growth.

Champion Engineering Practice standards and consistent ways of working across the domain and CBA, aligned with industry standards, while empowering teams to manage their work, resolve technical issues and continuously improve engineering quality.

Provide strong technical and architectural leadership for a modern, cloud-native technology landscape, including Java-based backend platforms, APIs, services and distributed systems, establishing architecture principles that promote scalability, resilience, security, maintainability and developer productivity.

Embed engineering excellence into delivery through security-by-design, observability, appropriate SLI/SLO/SLA practices, effective operational data flows, code reviews, refactoring and proactive management of technical debt and technology lifecycle.

Own delivery outcomes across engineering teams, translating business objectives into executable technology roadmaps and proactively managing dependencies, technical constraints, engineering risks and platform evolution.

Partner effectively with Product, Architecture, Data, Security, Operations, senior management and business stakeholders to remove blockers, enable execution and clearly communicate technology strategy, architectural decisions, trade-offs, delivery progress, risks and investment needs.

Participate in On-Call rosters from time to time, taking ownership of critical issue resolution and supporting the reliable and seamless operation of systems, products and platforms.

Essential Skills:

Candidates should ideally have significant experience in engineering leadership roles involving complex, business-critical technology environments. The Senior Engineering Manager should be technically credible, capable of participating in architecture decisions, challenging senior engineers constructively, evaluating technology choices and helping establish pragmatic engineering standards.

Engineering Leadership and People Management

Proven leadership of high-performing engineering teams.

Experience recruiting and developing engineers.

Strong coaching and performance management capability.

Experience managing senior technical contributors.

Demonstrated ability to lead teams through ambiguity and change.

Strong written and verbal technical communication.

Delivery, Execution and Stakeholder Management: Must Have strong delivery ownership, Dependency management, Risk management, Prioritization, Ability to communicate technical trade-offs.

Greenfield Engineering: Must Have a demonstrated experience building new platforms, products or systems, Ability to make architecture decisions, Ability to establish a practical path from MVP to scalable production architecture.

Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Engineering: Strong working knowledge of Public cloud architecture - AWS, Azure and/or GCP, Kubernetes, Docker/containerization. IaC, Terraform, Networking fundamentals, Load balancing, DNS, IAM, Secrets management, Backup and disaster recovery, Cloud security, Infrastructure automation.

Java and Backend Engineering: Strong conceptual and practical understanding of: Modern Java - Java 17/21+, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, API design, REST, Service architecture.

Distributed Systems and Modern Architecture: Strong knowledge of: API architecture, Event-driven architecture, Messaging, Idempotency, Domain boundaries, Distributed transactions, Scalability, Availability, Resilience patterns.

Site Reliability Engineering and Observability: Production reliability, Observability, Distributed tracing, Service health monitoring, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Chaos engineering.

Security and DevSecOps: Good understanding of: Secure-by-design principles, OAuth 2.0, Secrets management, TLS, API security, OWASP principles, Vulnerability management, Container security, Cloud security.

Data Engineering: Working knowledge of: Data architecture, Data pipelines, Batch processing, Streaming, Kafka or equivalent event streaming technologies, Event-driven data architectures, Experience with: Kafka, Spark, Snowflake

Education Qualification: Bachelor’s degree or master’s degree in engineering in Computer Science/Information Technology

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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