Senior AI-First SaaS Architect - Hybrid Sydney

Checkbox; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Sydney CBD office

Learning budget

Flexible leave

Annual off-sites

Transparent culture

Job summary

Checkbox is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer to act as the senior technical authority across product engineering streams in a hybrid Sydney-based role. You will govern key architectural decisions, ensure coherence across teams and write down decisions to prevent tribal memory loss.

This leadership position emphasizes working code and data-driven decisions, with a focus on security, tenancy and enterprise-scale SaaS architecture for a growing AI-enabled platform.

Qualifications

• Significant experience as a Principal Engineer or Architect in a modern SaaS environment.
• Deep systems expertise across product engineering, platform architecture, distributed systems and cloud-native software.
• Proven ability to design and govern high-impact architecture decisions across multiple teams.
• Comfortable contributing to production systems while setting broader technical direction.
• Strong understanding of tenancy, security, compliance and data isolation in enterprise SaaS environments.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own key architecture decisions across Checkbox’s product engineering streams, including high-consequence one-way-door decisions.
• Define, document and govern the future-state product architecture.
• Ensure architecture remains coherent across product streams, Platform, Data Engineering, QA and Enterprise IT.
• Identify and help build initiatives that accelerate engineering velocity and quality.
• Contribute to production releases and set the technical bar through working code.
• Drive decisions using data, feedback loops and measurable quality signals.
• Embed fitness functions and architectural measures into product engineering workflows.
• Partner with Data Engineering on data and AI reference architecture.
• Ensure tenancy, security and compliance are designed into systems from the start.
• Collaborate with Product, Customer Success and Sales to reflect customer needs in architecture.

Job description

Checkbox is seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer to act as the senior technical authority across product engineering streams in a hybrid Sydney-based role. You will govern key architectural decisions, ensure coherence across teams and write down decisions to prevent tribal memory loss.

This leadership position emphasizes working code and data-driven decisions, with a focus on security, tenancy and enterprise-scale SaaS architecture for a growing AI-enabled platform.