Principal Staff Engineer - Platforms

Seek®; Australia; Remote; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Learning budget

Performance bonuses

Wellbeing support

Job summary

ShiftCare is seeking a data-focused engineering leader to design and maintain scalable data pipelines and data models across Azure and AWS cloud environments. You will work with a SaaS product team to deploy production-grade ETL/ELT processes, mentor engineers, and ensure data quality and governance.

You will collaborate with product managers and architects to shape the roadmap, while implementing CI/CD and IaC practices for reliable deployments.

Qualifications

• Experience designing scalable data pipelines in SaaS/product environments.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native data architectures and governance.
• Experience with Databricks clusters and CI/CD for data workloads.
• Healthcare or regulated data handling experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the main engineering team to develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• Promote good engineering practices within the team and beyond.
• Identify and implement improvements to our products and processes to support our growth.
• Work on the team’s health on its path to becoming a high-performing team.
• Coordinate the delivery of features from the roadmap through each stage of the development cycle.
• Lead by example in terms of excellence, attention to detail, evaluating priorities and risks, designing scalable solutions, etc.

Skills

Python

SQL

PySpark

Data modelling

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Azure Databricks

Azure Data Factory

Azure SQL

Azure Storage

AWS

Job description

Job Description

About Us

Halo Labs is a future focused, end-to-end data solutions firm – transforming tomorrow, today. Our intelligent and secure technology systems and data driven solutions drive meaningful outcomes and unlock lasting value.

Why work at Halo Labs?

Leading Innovation: We don’t just solve problems; we illuminate a never-ending stream of innovation.

Exceptional Perks: Enjoy outstanding perks like a dedicated learning budget, performance bonuses, and comprehensive wellbeing support.

Remote-First Organisation: Experience the perks of remote work while having the flexibility to travel to client locations throughout Australia.

Inclusive and Engaging: Celebrate diversity in a welcoming space that thrives on new ideas and open conversations, all in a respectful environment.

Inspiring Origins: With a compelling founder story, we are a customer-focused, culture-first organisation.

About the role

• Design, develop, and maintain reusable in-house PySpark frameworks to enforce standardised data engineering patterns across the SaaS platform.
• Architect and implement scalable, production-grade ETL/ELT pipelines across Azure and AWS environments.
• Build distributed data processing solutions using Python and PySpark on Databricks.
• Develop batch and near real-time ingestion pipelines integrating third‑party clinical systems, healthcare APIs, and external enterprise platforms.
• Design secure data integration patterns (REST APIs, SFTP, event-driven ingestion, webhooks) ensuring compliance and data integrity.
• Work closely with Software Engineers to embed data services directly into the SaaS product architecture.
• Contribute to backend system design discussions to ensure data layer scalability, observability, and performance.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, Git, and Azure Pipelines for automated deployment and testing of data workloads.
• Apply infrastructure-as-code and environment management best practices across Azure and AWS.
• Optimise Spark jobs, cluster configurations, and storage strategies for performance and cost efficiency.
• Design and maintain robust data models, including dimensional models and SaaS-oriented data schemas.
• Implement data validation, monitoring, and alerting to ensure pipeline reliability and production stability.
• Provide technical mentorship and enforce engineering standards across the analytics and data engineering team.

About you

• Strong hands‑on experience with Azure services including Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, and Azure DevOps.
• Practical experience with AWS services relevant to modern data platforms (S3, Lambda, RDS, Glue, IAM, etc.).
• Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and PySpark for large-scale distributed data processing.
• Deep experience configuring and managing Databricks clusters for scalable big data workloads.
• Experience building production‑ready data pipelines in a SaaS or product‑led engineering environment.
• Strong understanding of cloud‑native data architecture, including data lakes, lakehouse architecture, and modular pipeline design.
• Experience integrating with third‑party systems via APIs and secure data exchange mechanisms.
• Exposure to healthcare or regulated data environments, including handling sensitive data securely.
• Strong knowledge of data modelling, metadata management, and data governance principles.
• Experience implementing automated testing frameworks for data pipelines.
• Solid understanding of DevOps practices including Git workflows, branching strategies, and CI/CD automation.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related technical field.

ShiftCare’s innovative software is a market leader which helps Australian & North American disability support providers, in‑home aged carers and allied health professionals streamline the way they work by creating efficiencies in rostering, client management and billing, enabling businesses to grow.

About The Team You’ll Be Joining

The ShiftCare Engineering team is on a mission to make ShiftCare accessible to more businesses across Australia and North America, but this is just the beginning of our journey. As we continue to grow at a rapid rate, we are having a fun time scaling our systems and processes appropriately.

You will help us ensuring our main feature development team delivers software designed, built and maintained to the highest standards to enable our growth.

We treat software development as a craft and are passionate about reliability, our customers, and doing more with less.

Reporting to ShiftCare’s CTO, you’ll manage remotely the engineers in the main feature development team and the ones to be hired, and be responsible for the team’s health and outcomes.

You’ll partner with the Product Managers and other leaders across ShiftCare Engineering to craft our roadmap, processes, and goals.

What You’ll Do In The Role

• Lead the main engineering team to develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• Promote good engineering practices within the team and beyond.
• Identify and implement improvements to our products and processes to support our growth.
• Work on the team’s health on its path to becoming a high‑performing team.
• Coordinate the delivery of features from the roadmap through each stage of the development cycle.
• Lead by example in terms of excellence, attention to detail, evaluating priorities and risks, designing scalable solutions, etc.

***Please note this is an Australian based role and is only open to individuals with full Australian work rights.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• You have ample experience designing and shipping scalable, reliable and maintainable systems that operated at large scale, ideally in a similar stack as ours: Ruby on Rails, React/Vue, AWS.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Ruby, React JS, Vue JS.
• Strong leadership and people management