Principal Staff Engineer - Platforms
The Team
SEEK’s purpose is to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives and help organisations succeed.
Our Platforms area builds the shared services, infrastructure and developer enablement that underpin SEEK’s experiences for candidates and hirers across APAC. We evolve self-service platform capabilities so teams can ship and operate services reliably, supported by strong observability capabilities.
You’ll work across an APAC-wide engineering organisation and partner closely with engineering, product, architecture, security, and AI & data leaders.
The Role
As a Principal Staff Engineer (Engineering Platforms), you are a technical authority for a major platform area and trusted advisor.
You’ll provide technical leadership, unblock complex delivery and operational challenges, lift engineering standards across multiple squads, and help ensure platform services remain fit-for-purpose, secure, resilient and aligned to SEEK’s broader technical strategy.
Key Responsibilities
Lead technical direction discussions for a major platform area with key stakeholders, aligning on target architecture, priorities and trade-offs.
Unblock hard problems: deep dive on complex technical issues (delivery, reliability, scaling), and guide teams to sound solutions.
Raise the bar on platform engineering: define “what good looks like” through standards, guardrails and paved paths, and evolve the platform with modern practices, patterns and tooling that improve adoption.
Shape and steer the roadmap with engineering and product leadership, aligning to business priorities while balancing near-term delivery with long-term technical health and platform adoption.
Grow technical leadership: coach Staff/Senior Staff engineers and uplift technical capability across the Platforms space.
Support AI-enabled uplift by partnering with the AI productivity teams and bringing transformative ways of working into the engineering system, driving adoption by embedding these practices into everyday engineering workflows
Stay hands-on where it matters: lead design reviews, pair with teams on critical problems, and prototype or contribute key changes to unblock progress.
Key Stakeholders
Engineering leadership: Engineering Managers, Heads of Engineering, Engineering Directors
Architecture & security: Software/Principal Architects, Heads of Architecture, Security leaders
Product & business: Product Directors, Head of Product and other domain leaders
Platform & data specialists: Staff/Senior Staff Engineers, Platform & Data Engineers, Infrastructure and Service/Incident Management teams
Qualifications
- Strong experience designing, building and operating platforms or large-scale distributed systems end-to-end.
- Proven ability to shape and execute technical strategy/roadmaps across multiple teams, balancing delivery with technical health and adoption.
- Demonstrated strength leading through influence: aligning stakeholders, negotiating trade-offs, and driving decisions to outcomes.
- Deep foundation in architecture and engineering fundamentals (reliability, scalability, performance, operability, observability, security).
- Experience improving developer experience via guardrails, paved paths and self-service, reducing toil and cognitive load.
- Track record of leading technical change and uplifting engineering quality and practices across teams.
- Strong coaching and mentoring capability, uplifting technical capability across teams; contributions to technical communities are valued.
- AI fluency for engineering productivity: able to evaluate AI-enabled tools/practices, set pragmatic guardrails, and help teams adopt what delivers value.
Additional Information
Permanent Perks
At SEEK we offer:
- Annual Performance Bonus Plan
- Support of flexible working, including a mix of office and work from home days depending on your role.
- Paid and unpaid leave benefits including Personal Flexi Days and Volunteer Days, as well as the opportunity to purchase additional leave
At SEEK, we are passionate about fostering a culture of inclusion and wellbeing that embraces and values the diversity of our people. We are a purpose driven business that works with heart.
We know teams with diverse ideas, experiences and perspectives are more creative and are critical to ensuring effective delivery and innovating to enable our future success. As such, we welcome applications from people with diverse backgrounds and life experiences, especially as they relate to gender, sexual identity, culture, faith, disability and life stages. If you have the skills, curiosity and an adaptable mindset but don't meet every responsibility or qualification listed in this advertisement, please still get in touch with us.
Should you require any specific support or adjustments throughout the recruitment process and beyond, please advise us and we will be happy to assist.
For this role, only those candidates with the eligible right to work will be considered.
SEEK kindly requests no unsolicited resumes or approaches from recruitment agencies and will not be responsible for any associated fees.