Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Principal Software Engineer
Commonwealth Bank of Australia is hiring a Principal Software Engineer in Bengaluru, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include RAG and AI safety.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 207 other open roles at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Organization:
At CommBank, we never lose sight of the role we play in other people’s financial wellbeing. Our focus is to help people and businesses move forward to progress. To make the right financial decisions and achieve their dreams, targets, and aspirations. Regardless of where you work within our organisation, your initiative, talent, ideas, and energy all contribute to the impact that we can make with our work. Together we can achieve great things.
Job Title: Principal Engineer
Location: Bangalore
Business & Team: Business Banking
Impact & contribution:
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with enterprise-level engineering leadership across modern full-stack platforms. You will shape technical strategy and architecture across customer and colleague-facing applications spanning web experiences, APIs, distributed services, data, cloud, workflow orchestration and AI-enabled capabilities. You will bring authoritative engineering depth across backend, frontend, distributed systems and cloud, while setting direction for scalable solutions using Temporal and durable workflow orchestration. You will champion AI-powered engineering, establish reusable patterns and guardrails, and influence how software is designed, built, tested and operated across multiple teams.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Set and drive technical strategy, target architecture and engineering direction across a portfolio of full-stack capabilities spanning modern web applications, APIs, services, data and AWS cloud platforms.
- Provide authoritative technical leadership across .NET/C#, Java/JVM or Node.js/TypeScript ecosystems and modern TypeScript frontends, remaining sufficiently hands-on to validate critical designs, patterns and engineering decisions.
- Define architecture for secure, resilient distributed systems at scale, establishing domain/service boundaries, event-driven and asynchronous patterns, consistency models, idempotency, fault tolerance and evolutionary architecture principles.
- Shape workflow architecture using Temporal and durable orchestration patterns, establishing approaches for long-running processes, retries, compensation, human-in-the-loop steps, state management, business rules, versioning and auditability.
- Lead complex modernisation and simplification across legacy estates through decomposition, API enablement, event-driven integration and cloud migration; establish transition architectures and drive removal of obsolete systems, code and technology debt.
- Set engineering expectations for cloud-native delivery, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, DevSecOps, automated quality, observability, SRE, resilience and production readiness, and ensure adoption across teams.
- Define and champion responsible AI-powered engineering across the SDLC and shape enterprise GenAI/Agentic AI architectures with robust evaluation, guardrails, security, observability, governance and human oversight.
- Lead the most consequential technical and architecture decisions, gain support for technical direction, and ensure execution across engineering, product, architecture, security, platform, data and business stakeholders.
- Build engineering capability through standards, coaching and sponsorship of senior technical talent.
Essential Skills:
Typically, 15+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience as a senior technical leader shaping strategy and architecture across complex enterprise platforms, domains or multiple engineering teams.
· Expert engineering depth in one or more of: .NET/C# and ASP.NET Core; Java/JVM and Spring Boot; or Node.js/TypeScript and modern server frameworks, with the breadth to govern architecture across heterogeneous technology stacks.
· Strong full-stack architecture experience with TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks such as React or Angular, including component/platform architecture, performance, accessibility, security and automated quality at scale.
· Deep expertise in microservices and distributed systems, API and integration architecture, event-driven systems, messaging, resiliency, scalability, concurrency and data consistency, with evidence of making sound trade-offs at enterprise scale.
· Deep data, security and quality engineering knowledge across relational/NoSQL databases, OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, OWASP, threat modelling and automated test strategies, with security embedded from the first line of code.
· Extensive AWS and cloud-native architecture experience across containers/Kubernetes/ECS, serverless services, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and production observability, including governance, reliability, cost and operational trade-offs.
· Strong knowledge of Temporal and durable workflow architecture, including workflows/activities, retries, signals, timers, compensation, versioning and operational patterns for reliable long-running distributed processes.
· Strong architecture knowledge of workflow and orchestration patterns, including human-in-the-loop workflows, rules, integrations, security, performance, governance, auditability and operational visibility.
· Advanced knowledge of Generative AI and Agentic AI architectures, including RAG, MCP/tool use, structured outputs, evaluation, guardrails, observability and responsible adoption in regulated enterprise environments.
· Exceptional architecture judgement and communication, with the ability to simplify ambiguity, make commercially pragmatic technology decisions, influence senior stakeholders and express direction through code, diagrams, ADRs, standards and concise technical narratives.
Years of Experience: 15+
Qualifications: Bachelor of Engineering, BTech or equivalent qualification, or equivalent relevant industry experience.
If you're already part of the Commonwealth Bank Group (including Bankwest, x15ventures), you'll need to apply through Sidekick to submit a valid application. We’re keen to support you with the next step in your career.
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Advertising End Date: 29/11/2026How we rate this
Principal Software Engineer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia rates 63 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
- If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG and AI Safety. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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