Staff Engineer

Cartology - Part of the Woolworths Group; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Team Discounts

Wellness support

Inclusive workplace culture

Job summary

Cartology, part of the Woolworths Group, in Sydney, seeks a Staff Engineer to own architecture across Ads Manager as it scales. You’ll oversee event-driven systems spanning campaigns, creatives and data delivery with a hands-on approach.

This is a technical leadership role focused on code and systemic impact rather than people management. You’ll influence architecture, drive technical roadmaps, and ensure performance, observability and durable APIs, while mentoring engineers and aligning with

Qualifications

• Typically 10+ years in software engineering with seniority evidence.
• Deep expertise in Kotlin and/or Java and JVM concepts.
• Strong experience with event-driven, distributed systems and architecture.
• Hands-on Google Cloud Platform knowledge with Kubernetes, Cloud SQL and BigQuery.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve architecture of critical Ads Manager systems.
• Drive technical roadmap across multiple teams and interfaces with partners.
• Set standards for Kotlin/Java services, ensuring performance and observability.
• Guide end-to-end integration between JVM backends and front-ends (React/TypeScript).
• Standardise GCP footprint and delivery pipelines with GitHub Actions and Terraform.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews and pairing on key components.
• Resolve cross-team architectural conflicts and communicate trade-offs.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

Spring Boot

Micronaut

Ktor

JVM Concurrency

GCP

Kubernetes

TypeScript

React

GitHub Actions

Terraform

BigQuery

GKE

Frontend-Backend integration

Tools

GKE

Cloud SQL

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

Terraform

Job description

Sydney based role with hybrid working model

Drive innovation across our technical capabilities

Surry Hills office location in Sydney close to public transport

We are Cartology

Cartology is one of Australia’s leading retail media businesses, powered by the Woolworths Group. We provide targeted omnichannel marketing solutions and comprehensive closed loop reporting to help brands grow. With Cartology, brands can drive real customer impact across the shopper journey.

Cartology is truly pioneering the future of Retail Media, creating, shaping and leading this new industry that connects brands to customers in new and exciting ways.

Be nothing but yourself in a culture that is inclusive and innovative. Work as part of an ambitious, smart and passionate team and belong to something meaningful as part of the Woolworths Group.

The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer you will hold the architectural line across Ads Manager as it scales. You will own the architecture of a critical part of the platform, spanning the event driven services that carry campaign, creative and audience data through to delivery and measurement, and you will be accountable for that architecture staying scalable, observable and comprehensible as the surface area grows.

This is a technical leadership role rather than a management one. You will spend real time in the code, and your impact will be measured as much by the engineers and systems you lift as by what you personally ship.

What you’ll do

Architectural Ownership: Own and evolve the architecture of one or more critical systems within Ads Manager, making the significant decisions that hold across multiple teams and driving the technical roadmap for your area

Campaign Orchestration and Distributed Systems: Act as the subject matter expert for message oriented, event driven design, and design the durable, long running processes that coordinate state between our platform and third party adtech systems

Technical Standards: Set the standard for Kotlin and Java services that are performant, observable, testable and maintainable, and make that standard easy to follow through tooling, templates and review rather than documentation alone

End to End Coherence: Guide the integration between JVM backends and React and TypeScript front ends, and the design of the APIs we expose to agencies and partners, so that contracts are typed, versioned and durable

Cloud and Delivery Engineering: Standardise and optimise our GCP footprint (GKE, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and mature our delivery pipelines through GitHub Actions and Terraform

Technical Mentorship: Spend significant time in the trenches with senior engineers through high impact code review, pairing on critical components, and design coaching that transfers judgement rather than answers

Cross Functional Influence: Resolve architectural conflicts that span team boundaries, build consensus around solutions that outlive any single project, and make the commercial cost of an architectural shortcut legible to non technical stakeholders

What You’ll Bring

Typically 10+ years in software engineering, with recent time operating at Staff, Principal or Lead level. With weight evidence of scope, being the systems you have owned and the decisions you made, more heavily than years served

Deep expertise in Kotlin and/or Java, including JVM concurrency and memory behaviour, and fluency in a modern framework such as Spring Boot, Micronaut or Ktor

Expert level knowledge of message oriented architectures, including delivery semantics, idempotency, ordering, backpressure and failure recovery

Hands on experience with Google Cloud Platform, specifically Kubernetes (GKE), Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and BigQuery, or comparable depth on AWS or Azure

Working proficiency in TypeScript and React, sufficient to review meaningfully and contribute when it matters

A track record of building resilient integrations with third party platforms you do not control, including reconciliation, retry and drift detection

Expert with Git and automating complex delivery workflows in GitHub Actions, with a genuine “you build it, you run it” mindset

What you’ll Experience

Team Discounts - Team discounts across our range of Woolworths Group brands you know and love and a robust rewards program that celebrates and incentivises purpose-driven work.

Wellness - Access to Sonder. Sonder provides free confidential 24/7 personalised financial, medical safety, psychological or physical support for team members and their families.

Everyone belongs at Woolworths Group As one of the largest employers in Australia and New Zealand, we aim to create a truly inclusive workplace where everyone feels that they belong, can be their best selves, and reach their full potential.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are key to realising our purpose of better together for a better tomorrow. We recognise the value our team’s diversity brings to our business, customers, and communities and that teams with diverse experiences