As Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering, you’ll own NABServ and drive its transformation into a secure, compliant software foundry that enables teams to build and release microservices at scale.

• Work in a collaborative environment with highly talented and motivated colleagues that are passionate about winning together
• Apply critical thinking and innovation as a trusted advisor to ensure production stability.
• Lead the future of platform engineering at NAB

Our people are customer obsessed. They prioritise the needs and satisfaction of the customer above all else. Our mindset fosters innovation and creates strong, lasting customer relationships as we strive to be the most customer centric company in Australia and New Zealand. 

In this Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering, role, you will join our Integration and Tech Governance team owning it and winning together.

Each day, you’ll go above and beyond to support with: 

• Build the platform. Design, code and ship the services, libraries, templates and self-service tooling that engineers use every day. You will write production code and be on the hook when it breaks.
• Treat engineers as customers. Talk to the teams using our platform, find out where they lose time, and fix it. Set a roadmap, measure adoption and retire what nobody uses instead of maintaining it forever.
• Make the paved road the fastest road. Build templates, scaffolding, pipelines, provisioning and observability defaults so that doing the right thing takes less effort than working around it. Adoption should be earned, not mandated.
• Design services that hold up. Break large systems into services with clean boundaries drawn around the business domain, and deal honestly with what those costs: versioning, contracts, data ownership, failure modes and the sprawl that follows when boundaries are wrong.
• Build event driven capability. Ship event streaming and messaging that teams can use without a specialist in the room. Schemas, contracts, delivery guarantees, replay, ordering and idempotency handled in the platform rather than rediscovered by every team.
• Automate first. Push testing, security, quality and control into pipelines and tooling. If something needs a human checkpoint, look for a way to encode it before accepting the meeting.
• Set direction and take people with you. Decide what we build and why, make the case in plain language, and lead multiple squads through influence rather than reporting lines. Mentor senior engineers and raise the standard of what gets shipped.
• Run it like a business. Know what the platform costs, what it saves and what it returns. Size investment, sequence work, make trade-offs explicit and say no to work that does not earn its place.

We’re looking for the best and brightest to deliver the best for our customers. You’ll need:  

• Deep hands-on experience building and operating microservices at scale, including the parts that go wrong under load and over time.
• Practical grounding in domain driven design used as a working tool for drawing service and data boundaries, not as vocabulary.
• Production experience with event driven systems on Kafka or equivalent, covering schema management, contracts and streaming patterns.
• A track record building developer platforms, internal tooling or developer experience products that other engineering teams chose to adopt.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems: multi region, high availability, performance and resilience under real traffic.
• Automation first habits evidenced in what you have shipped, across infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing strategy and policy as code.
• Product instincts. You have shipped, gathered feedback, iterated and cut scope, whether your users were customers or engineers.
• Experience setting technical direction for several teams and being accountable for whether it worked.
• The ability to hold a conversation about cost, risk and sequencing with executives, and about implementation detail with engineers, on the same day.

A diverse and inclusive workplace works better for everyone 

We know that our people make us who we are. That's why we have built a culture of equity and respect – where everyone feels valued and appreciated for being their authentic selves. In partnership with our multiple Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) we continue to foster an inclusive environment, where all NAB colleagues’ unique backgrounds and identities are understood, respected and celebrated.  We are committed to providing an environment where you can work your way.  

For details on the recruitment process, and accessibility, please visit https://www.nab.com.au/about-us/careers/apply-for-job.  To discuss adjustment requirements, please contact the NAB Careers team, via nab.careers@nab.com.au (please reference job number) or visit our Careers page through the link above for other contact options. 

Join NAB 

If you think this role is the right fit for you, we would love to hear from you. Please note candidate screening and interviews may be conducted prior to the closing date of the job advert. Unsolicited CVs from agencies will not be accepted.