Principal Cloud & Platform Engineer — AI-Driven Cloud Leadership

Westpac Bank; Sydney; On-site; AUD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Special offers on banking products and

Flexible work arrangements

Learning and development opportunities

Community volunteering initiatives

Job summary

Westpac Bank in Sydney is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and architectural governance at scale. Reporting to the Chief Engineer, Institutional Banking and Capital Solutions Technology, this role will guide engineering squads toward resilient, observable, and automated delivery.

You will lead complex design decisions, promote API-first design and CI/CD practices, embed Generative AI capabilities, and coach engineers on secure and reliable software delivery while

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering, architecture or platform engineering.
• Expertise in AWS architecture and cloud-native design.
• Experience with API-first design and Kafka integration.
• Proven ability to manage complex cross-team dependencies.
• Knowledge of Generative AI, RAG, agentic systems.
• Strong IaC and automation skills (Terraform/OpenTofu/Bicep).
• DevOps, CI/CD, testing, observability and platform tooling.
• Understanding AI governance and responsible AI controls.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and architectural governance.
• Lead complex engineering design and critical decisions.
• Review high-risk designs and cross-team dependencies.
• Develop reusable patterns and guardrails.
• Coach engineers on secure and reliable practices.
• Drive automation, testing, observability, and CI/CD.
• Support debt prioritisation and cost optimisation.

Skills

AWS Architecture

Cloud-Native Design

Microservices

Serverless

Kubernetes

API-First Design

Event-Driven Systems

Generative AI

RAG

Agentic Systems

AI Governance

Platform Engineering

DevOps

Security & Resilience

Cost Optimisation

Tools

Terraform

OpenTofu

Bicep

GitHub Actions

CI/CD Pipelines

Observability Tools

Vector Databases

AgentCore

LangGraph

CrewAI

AutoGen

Job description

Westpac Bank in Sydney is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership and architectural governance at scale. Reporting to the Chief Engineer, Institutional Banking and Capital Solutions Technology, this role will guide engineering squads toward resilient, observable, and automated delivery.

You will lead complex design decisions, promote API-first design and CI/CD practices, embed Generative AI capabilities, and coach engineers on secure and reliable software delivery while