Principal Engineer

Overview

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For over almost 60 years, our solutions have enabled impactful connections between some of the world’s leading brands and their customers. We’re a global technology company focused on creating dynamic, smart, personalized and engaging customer experiences powered by our range of digital hardware, our proprietary content management system and our industry leading signage solutions. We work in over 50 global markets and have 9 offices around the world, with a global headquarters located in Sydney, Australia.

Coates Group has the values of a family-owned business and the innovative spirit of a start-up, fueling our purpose – Creating Connections. Empowering Partnerships. Always Evolving. We are curious, charismatic, authentic and we value the diversity of our crew. We are imaginers, kindness enthusiasts, experts, creators, thinkers, challengers, collaborators and over-achievers. Together, as a Crew, we are revolutionizing the way the world’s leading brands leverage technology to drive the best customer experiences.

The Principal Engineer provides technical leadership by shaping architectural direction, guiding critical engineering decisions, and ensuring technology platforms evolve in a scalable, resilient, and strategically aligned way. Through deep technical expertise and cross-domain influence, the role sets and evolves technical direction across multiple squads and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes. The Principal Engineer acts as a trusted technical authority, enabling teams to design, build, and operate complex systems that meet long-term business and customer needs with confidence and consistency.

• Technical Direction & Architecture Defines and evolves the long-term technical and architectural direction across platforms and domains, ensuring alignment with business strategy and customer outcomes
• Translates business strategy into architectural principles, reference architectures, and multi-platform technical roadmaps
• Leads the design of large-scale, distributed, and mission-critical systems across teams
• Balances delivery speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability in major technical decisions
• Engineering Excellence & Governance Ensures engineering practices, standards, and decision-making enable high-quality, consistent delivery at scale
• Establishes and champions pragmatic engineering and architecture standards that are adopted in practice
• Provides architectural governance through design reviews, decision records, and reference implementations
• Sets expectations for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability in system design
• Platform Health, Risk & Sustainability Owns the long-term health and resilience of critical platforms by proactively addressing systemic risk and technical debt
• Identifies and resolves cross-domain architectural risks before they impact delivery or operations
• Acts as the final technical escalation point for complex, ambiguous, or systemic engineering challenges
• Leads root-cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring systemic fixes and sustainable outcomes
• Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence Raises the technical capability and effectiveness of the organization through influence, mentorship, and trusted technical leadership
• Mentors senior engineers and technical leaders to build architectural judgement and systems thinking
• Raises the technical bar through exemplary design quality, documentation, and decision-making
• Communicates technical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities clearly to senior and executive leaders

• Architecture Leadership
• Technical Depth
• Systems Thinking
• Complex Problem Solving
• Strategic Technology Judgement
• Influence Without Authority
• Delivery Enablement

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time working on large-scale, complex, or mission-critical systems
• Proven experience designing & evolving architectures across multiple teams, products, or platforms
• Track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team or domain
• Demonstrated success leading or shaping major system transformations,…