Position: Principal Engineer, Data

Make an impact as a technical leader in an exciting data focused space!

Join a collaborative, supportive team and solve interesting problems!

Permanent full time role based in Richmond

With bold and ambitious goals, REA Group is changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step – whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we’re proud to have been named in Australia’s “Top 5” Best Workplaces two years in a row, as well as being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women.

The Principal Engineer, Data will join the FS Engineering Leadership Team, which is within our Product & Technology team located in our Financial Services business (serving the Mortgage Choice & Prop Track brands). Our purpose is to offer home finance and other financial services to those using  &  for their property search. Given the opportunity of the size of that audience, the FS vision is to integrate a consumer’s property search with finance through a world class digital seamless process.

This will be achieved by building innovative consumer search and property finance application experiences that integrate the mortgage distribution channels of digital, phone and face to face.

FS is evolving how it leverages data and technology to deliver benefits for customers, we are now looking for an experienced data obsessed Principal Engineer to re‑imagine our data foundations for the next stage of growth.

• Actively participate in defining a clear data architecture and engineering strategy for your area by collaborating with Architects, Directors of Engineering, Engineering Managers, and Data Governance stakeholders.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to ensure all data‑related technical solutions are delivered in alignment with the agreed strategy, architectural principles, and compliance obligations.
• Develop and lead actionable plans to improve the health, resilience, and integrity of data pipelines and platforms across the domain.
• Promote exploration and assessment of emerging data technologies, practices, and patterns to maintain REA’s strength in data architecture and engineering.
• Design high‑quality, cross‑squad, data‑centric solutions in collaboration with a diverse set of stakeholders, ensuring interoperability across systems in the value chain.
• Foster a connected internal data engineering and architecture community, encouraging knowledge‑sharing, technical excellence, and alignment across squads.
• Engage externally to share expertise and showcase REA’s leadership in data engineering and innovation, further building the organisation’s reputation.
• You’ll be responsible for aligning data strategies and technical approaches across Engineering Managers (EMs) and Senior Engineering Managers (SEMs), influencing the data‑related direction for 3–6 squads operating at different points along our value chain. You will actively ensure product strategy and data strategy alignment, and engage early in product discovery to validate solutions, shaping innovations that unlock new insights and capabilities while meeting regulatory obligations.
• Coach and mentor experienced engineers, enabling the growth of future technical leaders in data engineering and architecture within your domain.

• 8+ years of experience in the data engineering space, with a focus on data pipelines, analytics, data services or related fields.
• Experience in the mortgage or financial services industry is a plus.
• Practical data related AI capability & similarly Hub Spot/CRM design/build would be beneficial.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Business, or a related field. A master's degree is a plus.
• Expertise in building data intensive applications and large‑scale distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of modern data architectures, batch and stream processing…