Technical Lead - Data Platform & Engineering

What you’ll be doing

As Technical Lead for Data Platform Engineering, you'll operate beyond individual domain ownership - providing cross-team architectural direction, running technical discovery, and acting as a technical partner to product and engineering leadership. This is an individual contributor role with informal mentoring responsibility, not a people-management position.

• Provide architectural direction across DPE's platform ensuring consistency and technical coherence across domains owned by different Senior Data Engineers.
• Act as a technical partner to product and engineering leadership, shaping technical strategy rather than only executing against a backlog.
• Set and evolve engineering standards across the team - code quality, testing, CI/CD, security, and data governance - ensuring they scale across multiple domains and squads.
• Provide technical oversight on major initiatives such as data democratisation and platform modernisation.
• Mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers, particularly on complex, cross-domain problems and architectural judgement.
• Represent DPE in cross-functional architecture and technical forums, building trust and alignment with adjacent teams (analytics, product, and other engineering groups).
• Identify emerging technology and tooling opportunities (including AI-augmented engineering) and bring evaluated, adoptable recommendations to the team.
• Help resolve the most ambiguous or highest-impact technical problems, stepping in where scope crosses multiple domains or ownership boundaries.

What we’re looking for

• Proven experience at Senior Data Engineer level or above, with demonstrated success owning significant platform domains end-to-end.
• Deep, cross-cutting expertise across the data platform stack: Snowflake, dbt Cloud, Python, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and AWS.
• A track record of driving architectural decisions that were adopted beyond your own immediate team or domain.
• Experience running structured technical discovery and communicating outcomes clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong stakeholder management skills - comfortable operating as a technical partner to product and engineering leadership with limited oversight.
• A demonstrated ability to mentor and uplift other engineers - influence through trust and technical credibility.
• Genuine curiosity about emerging tools and approaches (including AI-augmented engineering), balanced with rigour in evaluating them before recommending adoption.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, aligned with our values: (customer-obsessed, curious, connected).

We know not everyone will meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If you’re excited about the role and believe you can make a difference, we’d love to hear from you.

A few other things we want you to know...

• As an equal opportunity employer, carsales welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds, identities, abilities, and life experiences. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and supported.
• If you have a disability or require adjustments to participate fully in the recruitment process, please let us know - we’re here to support you.
• We understand the importance of work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements, including part-time options. If you’d like to explore this, just ask during the process.
• We’re also a proud Circle Back Initiative employer, which means we commit to responding to every applicant.
• Successful candidates joining the carsales team will need to complete a National Police Record check and must have full-time Australian working rights.

So come and join our team - because every role is a big role in our plans to go big.