Senior Principal Engineer, Intelligent Systems

Are you ready to be a big part of something big? 

At carsales, we're all about making buying and selling a great experience. For 25 years we’ve been evolving with the new economy to help people choose how they move today and tomorrow. 

When it comes to your career, we want to provide big opportunities to help you make a big impact. But for this to be possible, we strive to feel small. Small enough to quickly change tack, small enough to learn from different departments and small enough to connect authentically with leadership. 

Our Technology Team has embarked on an exciting phase of transformation, they work across all parts of our digital business. The Senior Principal Engineer will own and lead the thinking on how our engineering practice and architecture will evolve - particularly with how we're reimagining the future of intelligent vehicle buying & selling

Not something you’d expect from one of the country’s biggest tech companies, is it? 

We embrace a hybrid way of working – mixing working from home with the energy and connection that comes from being together in the office. We champion flexibility and have many policies, procedures and leave options to support flexible work. 

What’s on offer: 

• A place where you can move your career forward, where you’ll be continuously backed to make new ideas happen, and the chance to do work that makes real, significant impact in the world. 
• We’re proud to be recognised as one of Australia’s Best Workplaces™ by Great Place to Work®, a Family Friendly Workplace, a WORK180 endorsed employer for women.
• The support of a highly engaged, high-performing team including a leadership team that’s you’ll actually have face time with. 
• 24 weeks paid parental leave for primary caregivers, four weeks paid secondary caregivers leave, six weeks paid gender affirming care leave.

What you’ll do: 

• Lead the architectural vision for intelligent systems powering future product, ensuring interoperability between our core platforms and emerging data-intensive technologies
• Ensure carsales long-term architecture evolves in line with our long-term objectives, including enabling the needs of complex analytical workloads
• Take company-level, multi-year objectives and collaborate with Product & Engineering teams to shape the technical roadmaps required to achieve them
• Provide technical oversight and hands-on guidance by bootstrapping patterns that enable teams to then own, scale and build upon these components
• Collaborate across the Technology Leadership Team on the evaluation and selection of key frameworks, patterns and tools
• Guide engineering programs through high levels of ambiguity toward a commercial outcome or enhancing internal operational efficiencies

What are we looking for? 

Critical to success in the role is the ability to operate in the liminal space between business, data and technical practice.

• An all-of-business ownership mindset over siloed success, leading with integrity and accountability
• Ability to lead the distillation of company-level objectives into multi-year technical roadmaps
• Ability to guide the development of standards that unlock org-wide value and/or efficiency in how data-intensive services and data products are built
• Mastery of modern software architecture and distributed technologies, enough to advance the discipline where solving problems at a portfolio level
• Hands-on experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems that handle complex data processing, high-throughput APIs and real-time decisioning
• Proficiency in cloud ecosystems (preferably AWS, although not mandatory) with deep knowledge of services essential scalable applications and complex data workloads
• Experience with modern AI/ML frameworks, incl. LLM architectures, vector DBs, and MLOps principles is favoured

A few other things we want to let you know about... 

• carsales is an equal opportunity employer and we pride ourselves on fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage everyone of all ages, genders and backgrounds to apply. If you’re a candidate with a disability or you’ll need some adjustments to be at your best, let us know how we can provide you with additional support. 
• We know how important keeping that balance between work/life is and have a range of flexible working options on offer, including part time work. We are open to this conversation during our recruitment process - if you want to know more just ask. 
• We are a proud Circle Back Initiative Employer which means we are committed to responding to every job applicant. 
• Successful candidates joining the carsales family are required to undergo a National Police Record check and must have full-time Australian working rights on an ongoing basis. 

So come and join our team - because every role is a big role in our plans to go big.