Brunel has partnered with a leading Australian energy company on a contract opportunity for a Principal Software Engineer to join an established software engineering function. This role suits a senior individual contributor with deep AWS and distributed systems expertise, a track record of cross-team technical leadership, and a focus on long-term platform stewardship.
The Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader who maximises the impact of others by leading through example and influencing outcomes well beyond their immediate team. They mentor and support engineers across multiple teams, contribute to hiring and capability uplift, and actively share knowledge through coaching, workshops, and community learning to strengthen the overall Software Engineering discipline.
They set a clear technical vision and direction, defining where the bar sits and shaping strategies that cross organisational boundaries to achieve meaningful business outcomes. By establishing ambitious yet practical goals across a portfolio of work, they align technology decisions with business objectives, critically evaluate options, and continuously adjust direction in response to change. As a trusted custodian of platforms and systems, they provide stability, reliability, and confidence in long term platform ownership.
This role involves tackling the most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, applying deep industry insight and awareness of the evolving technology landscape to inform strategy and decision making. Principal Software Engineers develop proven systems and intentionally scale successful patterns across teams, removing barriers through thoughtful collaboration and shared purpose. They anticipate the needs of those around them, operate with professionalism and care in their communication, and create an environment where engineers can do their best work and continue to grow.
- Extensive experience as a senior software engineer and high-impact individual contributor
- Proven technical leadership across domains, influencing architecture and engineering practice without formal authority
- Strong ownership of critical platforms, accountable for architecture, reliability, performance, security and production operations
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native, serverless, event-driven and microservices architectures
- Sound judgement on trade-offs across scalability, cost, security and maintainability
- Advanced AWS cloud engineering, including IaC, IAM, networking, observability and resilience patterns
- Delivers end-to-end solutions, applying systems thinking to complex, evolving problems
- Strong programming foundations across multiple languages, with secure coding, testing and deployment expertise
- Lifts code quality, test coverage and system reliability across teams
- Embeds security through threat modelling, design reviews and risk management
- Influences engineering strategy, platform direction and roadmaps aligned to business outcomes
- Recognised mentor and coach, building capability across the discipline
- Strong communicator across engineering, product and executive audiences