Senior 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

As the way Australians shop continues to evolve, our Data and AI Team keep Coles at the forefront of modern retail. We combine data, artificial intelligence, and applied engineering to reimagine how our stores, supply chain, and digital channels operate — creating smarter, more connected, and seamless experiences for our customers and team members.

Operating as a centralised development and enablement function within Coles Technology, the team unites product, engineering, and platform capabilities to deliver the intelligence layer of the enterprise. We serve every part of Coles — from computer vision applications that enhance in-store experiences and reduce loss, to forecasting, optimisation, and decision-support solutions that drive efficiency, accuracy, and agility across our supply chain, retail operations, and corporate functions.

The scale and impact of this work are significant. Coles serves millions of customers each week across more than a thousand stores nationwide, and our AI and data capabilities provide the intelligence that underpins how we plan, move, sell, and serve. By combining deep data capability with applied AI and modern engineering, we’re enabling Coles to become a truly AI-enabled enterprise, transforming how we operate and how Australia shops every day.

About the role

For this exciting position within our Data and Artificial Intelligence team, we are seeking an experienced individual to build, enhance, and optimise core components of the Data & AI platform, including data pipelines, ML infrastructure, and APIs, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reusability.

Working closely with the Platform Manager, your main responsibilities will include the following but not be limited to the below: 

• Lead the configuration and management of cloud-native and hybrid environments (e.g., Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, Fabric), ensuring platform reliability, observability, and cost-efficiency. ​
• Identify and address platform technical debt, influencing architectural decisions that balance delivery speed with long-term maintainability. ​
• Champion quality engineering practices by designing robust automated tests and integrating them into CI/CD pipelines to ensure platform resilience and reliability. ​
• Own and manage platform release cycles, ensuring smooth deployments with minimal disruption, and driving adoption of automated deployment strategies. ​
• Implement and advocate for platform-level security controls (e.g., IAM, encryption, firewall rules), ensuring compliance with enterprise standards and proactively addressing vulnerabilities. ​
• Lead monitoring and incident response efforts, driving root cause analysis and continuous improvement to enhance platform stability and performance. ​
• Maintain and evolve platform documentation and engineering standards, ensuring clarity, consistency, and alignment with enterprise architecture. ​
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including data scientists, engineers, and product managers to enable efficient use of platform capabilities and accelerate delivery. ​
• Provide expert L2/L3 platform support, proactively resolving complex issues across data and ML workflows, and ensuring SLAs and operational excellence are consistently met.

Leadership

• Stay current with emerging trends in data and AI technologies, tools, and frameworks, and actively bring external innovation into platform engineering practices. ​
• Build and maintain strong relationships with strategic vendors, academic institutions, and industry networks to unlock new opportunities, knowledge sharing, and collaborative initiatives. ​
• Document platform engineering outcomes, learnings, and next steps in a structured and reusable format to support continuous improvement and knowledge transfer. ​
• Act as an innovation advocate, inspiring curiosity and adoption of modern data and AI technologies across engineering teams and the broader organisation.​
• Build and maintain strong relationships within and outside the team to ensure business needs are met; influence where required and assist with stakeholder engagement to promote collaboration, understanding and commitment.​
• Act as a mentor/coach to fellow team members to ensure high quality products and services are developed (e.g. quality assurance to ensure developed code follows established procedures and practices).

About you and your skills

• Extensive experience developing and optimising data and AI platform services, providing deep specialised knowledge in cloud-native data infrastructure and ML tooling.​
• Delivered outcomes across multiple platform components, contributing to solution design and architecture while ensuring alignment with implementation requirements.​
• Scoped and specified platform solutions, gaining stakeholder support through clear articulation of technical direction and business value. ​
• Collaborated effectively with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing platform capabilities that meet business needs and deadlines.​
• Coached and influenced engineers to uphold high standards in platform development, fostering a culture of quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.​
• Experience in Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, Power BI, Fabric, Azure ML

Commercial Skills

• Extensive experience developing and optimising data and AI platform services, providing deep specialised knowledge in cloud-native data infrastructure and ML tooling.​
• Delivered outcomes across multiple platform components, contributing to solution design and architecture while ensuring alignment with implementation requirements.​
• Scoped and specified platform solutions, gaining stakeholder support through clear articulation of technical direction and business value. ​
• Collaborated effectively with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing platform capabilities that meet business needs and deadlines.​
• Coached and influenced engineers to uphold high standards in platform development, fostering a culture of quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.​
• Experience in Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, Power BI, Fabric, Azure ML

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: 174692

Employment Type: Full time

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