Principal Software Engineer

Commonwealth Bank of Australia · Sydney CBD Area

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Principal AI Engineer — FrontierOS

• You are collaborative and enjoy solving analytical problems to help our team to reach highest potential
• We are a team of big thinkers who are engineering the future of banking
• Together we will build tomorrow’s bank today, using world-leading technology and innovation 

Role purpose

Lead the technical vision, architecture and engineering delivery of FrontierOS: a platform that enables people and AI agents to deliver change, operate services, manage risk and continuously improve within clear governance boundaries.

You will turn the FrontierOS vision into a practical roadmap and production capabilities, connecting AI-assisted delivery, assurance, operational workflows and reusable agents into a coherent platform. Combining deep engineering expertise with delivery leadership, you will remain hands-on in critical implementation and design decisions while developing the team’s capability.

The role is accountable for technical quality and delivery, working alongside product, business, security and risk owners to ensure FrontierOS creates measurable value with appropriate human oversight.

Key responsibilities

• Own technical direction and delivery. Translate the FrontierOS vision into architecture, priorities and achievable milestones. Sequence dependencies, resolve blockers and make clear trade-offs across functionality, maintainability, reliability, cost and risk.
• Build the Agentic Control Plane. Lead the engineering of platform policies, human and agent permissions, initiative scope, ownership and approval boundaries. Ensure actions, decisions and artefacts are traceable, with exceptions routed to accountable owners.
• Connect delivery and assurance through Change.ai. Develop integrated workflows spanning scoping, implementation, testing, risk assessment, release approval, deployment and production operation. Make assurance evidence part of delivery, with explicit human decisions at the required gates.
• Deliver operational capabilities through Agentic HQ. Lead workflows for identifying potential control lapses, investigating incidents, proposing remediation and supporting breach reporting. Connect technical incidents to investigation, recovery and verification through Agentic SRE.
• Enable reusable agents and workflows. Develop the Pod Factory and workspace capabilities so teams can assemble agents into repeatable workflows with human checkpoints. Support workspace experimentation and a clear review, approval and versioning path for globally shared agents.
• Establish evaluation and continuous improvement. Build the learning loop that turns operational feedback and synthetic cases into evaluation datasets and candidate improvements. Require comparison against the current version and defined acceptance criteria, with human approval before promoting global improvements.
• Set the engineering standard through hands-on work. Design, implement and review critical platform components. Champion simple interfaces, clear ownership, meaningful behavioural tests, root-cause fixes and dependable CI/CD.
• Own production readiness and visibility. Establish observability, resilience, performance and cost management. Provide useful visibility into delivery progress, business outcomes and material risks, supporting both operational intervention and executive oversight.
• Develop the team and drive adoption. Mentor engineers, strengthen technical judgement and improve AI-assisted engineering practices. Work with users and stakeholders to demonstrate outcomes, incorporate feedback and turn successful capabilities into an adopted way of working.

Experience and capabilities

Extensive experience designing and delivering complex software platforms, with sustained hands-on technical leadership.

• Practical experience building production AI applications using agent orchestration, tool integrations, retrieval, context management and evaluation.
• Strong expertise in backend services, APIs, modern web applications, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Experience engineering permissions, approval workflows, auditability and secure integrations across enterprise systems.
• Strong judgement in automated testing, release engineering, observability and production reliability.
• Ability to turn an ambitious product vision into sequenced delivery while keeping architecture coherent and implementation pragmatic.
• A record of improving engineering quality through thoughtful reviews, mentoring and direct technical contribution.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineers, business leaders and security, risk and governance stakeholders.
• Experience delivering within a regulated enterprise or similarly demanding environment.

Working with us 

Whether you’re passionate about customer service, driven by data, or called by creativity, a career with CommBank is for you.   
Our people bring their diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives to build a respectful, inclusive, and flexible workplace with flexible work locations. One where we’re driven by our values, and supported to share ideas, initiatives, and energy. One where making a positive impact for customers, communities and each other is part of our every day.  
Here, you’ll thrive. You’ll be supported when faced with challenges and empowered to tackle new opportunities. We’re hiring engineers from across Australia and have opened technology hubs in Melbourne and Perth. We really love working here, and we think you will too.  
We’re looking for people who truly live our values, Care, Courage and Commitment and we’ll offer you great opportunities to develop you career with us
If this sounds like the role for you then we would love to hear from you. Apply today!

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