Staff Engineer

About Cartology

Cartology, powered by the Woolworths Group, is a leading Australian retail media company delivering targeted omnichannel marketing solutions along with comprehensive closed-loop reporting to assist brands in growth. It is at the forefront of Retail Media, creating innovative connections between brands and customers.

The company fosters an inclusive and innovative culture where employees can be authentic and work alongside a passionate, ambitious team with meaningful impact.

Role Overview

Based in Sydney with a hybrid working model, this Staff Engineer position involves architectural ownership within the Ads Manager platform. The role focuses on the architecture of systems that manage campaign, creative, and audience data, ensuring scalability, observability, and clarity as the platform expands. This is a technical leadership role focused on hands-on coding and elevating both engineers and systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership and advance architecture for critical systems in Ads Manager, guiding the technical roadmap across multiple teams.
• Be the subject matter expert on message-oriented, event-driven design, creating durable processes coordinating state between the platform and external adtech systems.
• Establish technical standards for Kotlin and Java services emphasizing performance, observability, testability, and maintainability, promoting adoption via tooling and reviews rather than just documentation.
• Ensure end-to-end coherence by steering integration between JVM backends, React/TypeScript frontends, and partner agencies via typed, versioned, and durable API contracts.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure primarily within GCP (GKE, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and enhance delivery pipelines using GitHub Actions and Terraform.
• Provide technical mentorship through intensive code reviews, pairing sessions on key components, and design guidance that nurtures decision-making skills.
• Navigate architectural conflicts across teams, foster long-lasting solution consensus, and communicate the commercial impact of architectural trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Candidate Profile

• Typically possesses over 10 years of software engineering experience, recently at Staff, Principal, or Lead levels, supported strongly by track records of ownership and impactful decisions.
• Advanced proficiency in Kotlin and/or Java, including concurrency and memory management on the JVM, plus experience with frameworks like Spring Boot, Micronaut, or Ktor.
• Expert understanding of message-oriented architectures, including key concepts such as delivery semantics, idempotency, ordering, backpressure, and failure recovery.
• Practical experience with Google Cloud Platform services—Kubernetes (GKE), Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, BigQuery—or comparable cloud platforms like AWS or Azure.
• Competent in TypeScript and React, able to conduct meaningful code reviews and contribute as needed.
• Proven ability to build reliable integrations with third-party platforms involving reconciliation, retry mechanisms, and drift detection.
• Expertise with Git and automating sophisticated delivery pipelines in GitHub Actions, embracing a "you build it, you run it" philosophy.

Additional Benefits

• Enjoy employee discounts across Woolworths Group brands and participate in reward programs recognizing purpose-driven contributions.
• Access to Sonder, which offers confidential 24/7 personalized support encompassing financial, medical, safety, psychological, and physical needs for employees and their families.

Diversity and Inclusion

As a prominent employer in Australia and New Zealand, Woolworths Group is committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment where all individuals feel valued, can be authentic, and are encouraged to reach their full potential. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are central to their mission to create a better future together.