Lead Platform Engineer - Hawthorn East

We’ve been proudly serving Australian communities since 1914 and have grown to become a top 30-listed company on the ASX with a portfolio of iconic homegrown brands. At the heart of our continued success is over 115,000 team members working across the country, all contributing to bringing our customers smiles. You’ll not only get to see your work make a difference, you’ll be part of a team working together to help Australians eat and live better every day.

About the team

Our Technology team is the backbone of the business, building and maintaining the information technology infrastructure that support Coles Group. As a part of the Technology team, you get the opportunity to work through complex, challenging, meaningful problems using large data sets and new technologies to expand your skills and experience.

About the role

We are currently recruiting for a Lead Platform Engineer to contribute to the development of the Data & AI platform technology roadmap, ensuring alignment with business priorities and customer value.

You will also:

• Lead the design, development, and testing of platform services, identifying opportunities for improvement and delivering scalable, secure, and high-performing solutions. ​
• Manage technical risks and ensure non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, reliability, scalability) are addressed; actively participate in forums to reduce platform technical debt.​
• Define and drive quality engineering practices, including automated test coverage, CI/CD integration, and feedback loops from production incidents.​
• Lead planning and coordination of large-scale platform releases across multiple environments; recommend and implement automated deployment strategies and monitor post-release performance. ​
• Provide accurate estimations of development effort, resources, time, and complexity across agile and waterfall delivery models.

Leadership

• Stay current with emerging trends in data and AI technologies, tools, and frameworks, and actively integrate external innovation into platform engineering practices. ​
• Build and maintain strong relationships with strategic vendors, academic institutions, and industry networks to unlock new opportunities, foster knowledge sharing, and enable collaboration. ​
• Document platform engineering outcomes, learnings, and next steps in a structured, reusable format to support continuous improvement and knowledge transfer.

About you and your skills

• Extensive experience designing, developing, and optimising enterprise data and AI platforms, with deep expertise in cloud-native infrastructure, distributed systems ​
• Delivered outcomes across multiple platform components and domains, contributing to solution architecture, technical strategy, and alignment with business and implementation requirements. ​
• Scoped and specified complex platform solutions, gaining stakeholder support through clear articulation of technical direction, business impact, and alignment with strategic goals. ​
• Led cross-functional collaboration across engineering, data science, product, and architecture teams to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing platform capabilities. ​
• Provided technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, fostering a culture of quality, innovation, and continuous improvement through coaching, peer reviews, and knowledge sharing. ​
• Played a key role in platform governance, ensuring adherence to engineering standards, architectural patterns, and enterprise compliance requirements. ​
• Actively contributed to platform roadmap planning, prioritisation, and delivery sequencing based on business value, technical feasibility, and resource capacity.​
• Experience in designing and integrating solutions using (Azure, Snowflake, Databricks etc.) with a strong understanding of their interoperability and optimisation. ​
• Led incident response and post-mortem analysis for platform services, driving root cause resolution and embedding learnings into platform resilience strategies. Partnered with vendors and external stakeholders to evaluate new technologies, influence platform direction, and bring innovation into the organisation.

Skills and Qualifications

• Demonstrates deep expertise in data and AI platform engineering, with advanced knowledge of cloud-native services, distributed data infrastructure, and ML tooling. ​
• Applies emerging practices and technologies to platform strategy, translating complex concepts into actionable recommendations aligned with business outcomes. ​
• Uses systems thinking to design platform solutions that are scalable, secure, and sustainable, considering enterprise-wide interactions and long-term impact. ​
• Leads experimentation and prototyping efforts to validate new ideas, balancing innovation with risk and operational feasibility. ​
• Develops intuitive, robust technical solutions to complex business problems using sound design principles and real-world applicability. ​
• Architect platform solutions to meet functional and non-functional requirements, including extensibility, performance, security, and maintainability. ​
• Solves complex challenges using data-driven analysis and a systems perspective, providing clear, pragmatic recommendations to support decision-making. ​
• Demonstrates strong commercial acumen by aligning engineering decisions with business strategy, contributing to business case development, and ensuring cost-effective delivery.​
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

What’s in it for you?

• Flexible working options: We know that work is only one part of your life, so we actively encourage a positive work-life balance and provide hybrid working options to help you achieve it.
• Office perks: Take advantage of our gym facility and fitness classes, free parking, BBQ area, mini-Coles supermarket, fooderie hub where you can sample new products before they hit the shelves, school holiday program and so much more when you come in.
• Discounts: Eligible team members receive 5% discount all year round on your Supermarket and Liquor online and in-store purchases. We also offer additional periods of double discount (10%) at various times throughout the year. As well as hotdeals exclusive to team members that translate into additional savings.
• Reward through recognition: Give and receive recognition, linked to our Coles values, through our digital recognition platform ‘mythanks’. You can accumulate points to redeem in the online shop for exciting gifts and electronic gift cards from an extensive range of retailers.
• Opportunities for learning and development: No matter where you start within our diverse business, you’ll have experiences, exposure, and education to satisfy you. Discover and explore a variety of career development programs and job-specific training.
• Paid parental leave: We understand how important your life outside work is and offer permanent team members paid parental leave to support you in balancing work and family.
• Investment in your future: Our annual team member share plan offer allows eligible team members to make regular pre-tax salary sacrifice deductions to purchase Coles Group shares.

About the recruitment process

We’re continuing to build a gender equitable team, and a culture that is just as diverse, inclusive and welcoming as the communities we serve. We are committed to creating a workplace that is safe and respectful for our team. We encourage applications from people of all ages, cultures (including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), abilities, sexual orientation and gender identities.

We’re happy to adjust our recruitment process to support candidates with disability. For further information and additional contact details visit the ‘Our Recruitment Process’ section of our careers site or email inclusionrecruitment@coles.com.au

Job ID: 174718

Employment Type: Full time