Principal Engineer

DPN; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working: three days in the Cron

Birthday leave

Employee Assistance Program

Regular team celebrations

Stunning beachside offices

Job summary

imagina is building Atlas, a governed system of record for its ventures. You will be the first senior engineer to define what the system must own and what it should never build, writing the core specification and building the foundational layer with two AI Engineers beside you.

You will lead technical decisions, work with a founder-led team and operate in a small, hands-on role that shapes the platform’s direction and resilience.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and shipping foundational production systems.
• Ability to translate business intent into system design and build order.
• Proven ability to lead small engineering teams while writing code.

Responsibilities

• Decide the implementation strategy with architecture-aligned evidence.
• Write the core specification: entities, lifecycle states, permissions and events.
• Build the foundational layer and validate it with a real-load loop.
• Assess how current systems connect and plan the integration sequence.
• Lead two AI Engineers daily: standards, reviews and coaching.

Skills

System design

Production systems

AI tooling

Leadership

Business context

Tools

Architecture patterns

Security & recoverability

Job description

Foundation, architecture and platform for our system of record.

imagina Group brings together multiple ventures across property, finance and management, including DPN property investment, the business where our story began 30 years ago.Everything imagina has built since rests on what DPN learned doing that work. We are now building Atlas, our governed system of record: what is true right now, what was decided, by whom and why, and what happened next. People keep the judgement. AI helps, and takes on more of the work only where it has proved it can be trusted.

About the role

You will be our first senior engineer, and the person who decides what the system must own and what it should never build.

Your first job is to test the implementation path with evidence: commercial platform, open components, sovereign build or hybrid. You then write the core specification and build the foundational layer the rest of the platform sits on, with two AI Engineers alongside you, validating it through a first closed loop run for a quarter under real operational load. Later loops extend the same foundation, and how they integrate into one platform is part of the design from the start.

You work alongside the Head of Fidelity, who protects the architecture, the Founder, who holds the final say on it, and the leaders running brand, treasury, culture and the operating ventures. A large part of the job is making technical decisions legible to them, and taking their constraints seriously in the design.

This is a hands‑on role with a small team and a real operating business to build against.

What you will do

• Decide the implementation strategy, tested against the architecture and recorded with evidence.
• Write the core specification: entities, identity, lifecycle states, obligations, permissions, events, decisions, rationale and lineage.
• Build the foundational layer and prove it with the first closed loop, then run it for a quarter under real load.
• Assess how our current systems connect to it and recommend the sequence. Atlas is our operating system, and Meridian, our partner portal, is the proving ground.
• Lead two AI Engineers technically, day to day: standards, review, coaching. Their formal reporting sits elsewhere, so you lead the engineering without the administration.

About you

We are less interested in your title than in what you have built and how you think.

You may be a senior, staff or principal engineer at a product company, a scale‑up or a consultancy. You may have built the foundation of a system that a company then grew around. What matters is this:

• You have designed and shipped the foundation of a production system and operated it afterwards.
• You have worked in depth across state and entity design, events and workflow, permissions, lineage, integration, security and recoverability.
• You use AI tools every day to design, build and test, and you can show where you overrode the model and why.
• You have made a build‑or‑buy decision you can defend, including a time you chose not to build.
• You have led or coached a small team while still writing code.
• You can read a business well enough to turn its intent into system design and a build order.
• You believe judgement belongs with accountable people, you work from a written record, and you can explain a technical decision clearly to people who are not engineers.

Life at imagina

imagina is a platform for building ventures, systems and experiences that help people live better, more beautiful and more financially confident lives. Our mission is simple: we imagine and build so beautiful realities can be lived.

We are serious about what we do, but not about ourselves.

You will join a team that values initiative, collaboration, clarity, high standards and continuous improvement, in a founder‑led enterprise with serious ambition.

Along the way, you will also enjoy:

• Stunning designer offices by the beach in Cronulla
• Hybrid working: three days in the Cronulla office, two from home
• Paid birthday leave
• Regular team celebrations and events
• Employee Assistance Program

imagina welcomes applications from people of all backgrounds.