Lead Software Engineer - Web - 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
This role is for a Lead Engineer working within the Platform squad as part of our digital products portfolio. The position is responsible for the ongoing development and evolution of our GraphQL platform and will own the technical direction, security posture, and operational health of the web platform, enabling product engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing customer experiences.
Work Experience
- Extensive software engineering experience in large-scale, customer-facing digital platforms.
- Strong hands-on experience with React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and modern web development practices.
- Experience leading or contributing to frontend, web platform, or shared engineering capabilities used by multiple teams.
- Proven experience with GraphQL platforms, ideally including federation, schema governance, and API lifecycle management.
- Strong understanding of secure engineering, vulnerability remediation, CI/CD, test automation, and DevSecOps practices.
- Experience improving platform reliability, performance, maintainability, and developer experience.
- Ability to influence technical direction, align teams, and balance roadmap, operational, and security priorities.
- Strong leadership capability, including coaching, mentoring, and technical uplift of engineers
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills across engineering, delivery, product, and security functions.
Key Responsibilities
- Platform Strategy and Roadmap
- Own and evolve the technical roadmap for the web and GraphQL platform.
- Align platform investment with product priorities, security obligations, and operational needs.
- Define target-state architecture, engineering standards, and platform guardrails.
- Identify and prioritise platform uplift, technical debt reduction, and resilience improvements.
- Partner with engineering leaders to ensure platform direction supports the Coles App and CUSP digital channels.
- Security, Risk, and Vulnerability Management
- Lead vulnerability management across the web platform, including prioritisation, remediation planning, and reporting.
- Drive timely resolution of high-risk findings and reduce repeat or ageing vulnerabilities.
- Embed secure engineering practices, dependency management, and remediation standards.
- Partner with Cyber Security and DevSecOps teams to improve the platform’s security posture.
- Support risk treatment across application, dependency, configuration, and architecture concerns.
- Edge Platform, Imperva, and Traffic Management
- Own and govern edge platform configuration, including Imperva, WAF controls, bot mitigation, caching, and traffic management.
- Ensure edge controls support security, resilience, performance, and customer experience outcomes.
- Review and optimise traffic management and protection patterns.
- Support rapid mitigation of customer-facing web threats or edge-related production issues.
- Platform Engineering and Modernisation
- Lead platform upgrades, framework uplift, dependency management, and ongoing modernisation of the web stack.
- Improve delivery speed, engineering quality, and maintainability through tooling, automation, and platform capabilities.
- Keep shared web technologies current, supported, secure, and fit for purpose.
- Establish upgrade paths and standards that help product squads adopt platform changes safely.
- GraphQL Platform Governance
- Govern GraphQL platform standards, including federation, schema quality, contract management, and integration patterns.
- Ensure GraphQL platform decisions support reliability, maintainability, and a consistent developer experience.
- Partner with engineering leaders to define and enforce shared API and platform standards.
- Reduce avoidable integration issues through strong governance and cross-team alignment.
- Operational Reliability and Engineering Quality
- Own the operational health of the web and GraphQL platform, including reliability, observability, and production readiness.
- Drive incident prevention, response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
- Define quality expectations for testing, release readiness, and platform change management.
- Improve platform stability, reduce repeat incidents, and support reliable delivery across digital channels.
- Team Enablement and Technical Leadership
- Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentoring to engineers working with the web and GraphQL platform.
- Help teams solve complex platform, architecture, delivery, and operational challenges.
- Drive adoption of engineering standards, reusable patterns, and healthy development practices.
- Build a strong culture of accountability, collaboration, quality, and continuous improvement.
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: 175074
Employment Type: Full time
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