Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer
Clerk Grade: 11/12
Employment Type: Full Time, Temporary 12 months, with strong potential for extension.
Location:  4 Parramatta Square and  McKell, Rawson Place Sydney at times. Hybrid working, which is subject to change based on team needs or broader divisional and DCS flexible work policies.

This role sits within the NSW Fair Trading Division in the Digital team

About the team
NSW Fair Trading (FT) is responsible for the administration of property and consumer protection laws in NSW. The Fair Trading Digital team works collaboratively with key internal and external stakeholders to provide the best digital solutions for our customers.

About the role

Fair Trading Digital is implementing a multi-year Digital Modernisation Strategy.
As Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction for one of two projects, leading the build of a new flagship digital platform (Salesforce based) and transition away from a legacy platform.
You will be the lead Salesforce developer for the product build. This is an exciting and critical role to take charge of up to three engineering squads. You will take on design, estimation, engineer supervision, coding and quality assurance for the new product, including integration and cutover support.

Your Responsibilities

- Application design: Define, refine and maintain overall solution architecture for the application / new platform. Design and implement data models and reusable integration patterns with other internal and external applications. Work with other technical leads across the wider organisation. Recommend solution options in line with best practice and product objectives. Embed accessibility, security, reliability and scalability into the design.
- Agile product development: Support product managers, designers and business analysts to produce epics and stories, prioritise features and plan releases. Collaborate with other leads and team members, within and outside of Agile ceremonies, to finalise requirement definition, estimate build effort, plan testing needs and mitigate technical risks. Coach engineers, allocate work and review code.
- Risk & quality assurance: Identify and mitigate technical risks. Oversee dependent technical work of vendors, other internal teams or projects. Ensure architectural consistency and technical quality through code reviews, standards enforcement, and oversight of all testing and deployment activity. Proactively support with defect triage and take responsibility for remediation. Ensure decisions and actions regarding build choices and code changes are traceable.
- Team leadership & delivery: Assemble and motivate a team of engineers. Support recruitment and onboarding. Ensure velocity against roadmap targets for both design and build. Foster a high-performing, self-organising team culture with continuous improvement in delivery practices.
- Stakeholder communication: Act as the primary technical liaison across business, delivery, and executive stakeholders for your project. Collaborate with and oversee vendor technical counterparts where needed. Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and technical direction clearly and effectively.
- Transition & decommissioning: Lead flexible go-live planning, data migration, and legacy system transition to ensure technical readiness and compliance. Help establish the long-term support model, ensuring operational readiness and service continuity post go-live.

To be successful in this role you will demonstrate (required attributes):

- Very strong Salesforce product expertise including public sector solution and experience cloud. (Mulesoft ability is an advantage.)
- Experience of Omnistudio, dev ops (e.g. Azure, Copado) and other ecosystem technologies.
- Experience with workflow automation and an understanding of AI implementation. An understanding of content management for experience cloud.
- Experience with multiple new platform or application builds, and system cut overs, including oversight of other engineers.
- Excellent documentation, communication and cross functional collaboration skills.
- Work habits that prioritise outcomes, through commitment to speed, flexibility and quality of deliverables with minimal supervision.
- Knowledge of, or ability to adapt to NSW Government practices and standards.

Salary Grade 11/12, with the base salary for this role starting at 149,739 base plus superannuation

Click Here to access the Role Description. For enquiries relating to recruitment please contact Francis Wen via francis.wen@customerservice.nsw.gov.au.

Visit the Capability Application Tool to prepare for the recruitment process by accessing practice application and interview questions based on the focus capabilities listed in the role description.

Closing Date: Friday, 24th April 026 (at 9:59am)

Careers at Department of Customer Service
A career at the Department of Customer Service (DCS) gives you the opportunity to help improve government services and be part of reform that benefits people across NSW.  We are focused on delivering excellent customer service, digital transformation, and regulatory reform. Come join us and influence the future of our great state.

Belong in our diverse and inclusive workplace   

The strength of our workforce lies in its diversity and embracing difference, while the key to our success is leveraging the contributions of employees with different backgrounds and perspectives.

You can view our full diversity and inclusion statement here.

We want you to bring your best self to this application process. If you have any support or access needs that may require adjustments to allow you to fully participate in this selection process (including an alternate format of the application form) please contact francis.wen@customerservice.nsw.gov.au or 02 9494 8351.

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