About this role
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
The Engineering Manager leads the design, development, and delivery of technology solutions within their assigned retail domain such as supermarkets, liquor, or group platforms ensuring outcomes that are reliable, scalable, and aligned with enterprise technology direction. This role is responsible for enabling high-performing engineering teams through strong technical leadership, modern delivery practices, and a culture of quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.
The Engineering Manager oversees solution delivery across multiple squads or product areas, ensuring consistent engineering standards, efficient operations, and effective collaboration with architecture, product, and platform teams. Working closely with business stakeholders, the Engineering Manager translates strategic priorities into actionable engineering outcomes, balancing technical excellence with business value. The role plays a key part in shaping the organisation’s engineering capability, fostering talent development, and delivering technology that drives exceptional customer and operational experiences.
Responsibilities
- Technical Leadership & Strategic Enablement - Set and maintain a high technical bar across engineering areas of focus, ensuring modern, scalable and performant architecture and design decisions
- Organisational Capability & Leadership - Build and scale a diverse, engaged and high-performing engineering organisation with clear career pathways and succession planning
- Platform / Product Resilience & Performance - Ensure end-to-end reliability, performance, and availability of key platforms and applications, proactively identifying and resolving technical debt and operational bottlenecks
- Engineering Governance & Delivery Oversight - Drive alignment to engineering governance frameworks, ensuring adherence to quality, compliance and operational risk controls
- Engineering Quality & Excellence - Champion a culture of engineering excellence, embedding quality, performance, maintainability and security throughout the software development lifecycle
Experience
- 5+ years experience leading multiple cross-functional engineering teams in a large-scale, complex enterprise or digital-first environment
- Proven track record managing engineers at different levels of experience, with responsibility for talent development, performance and engagement
- Extensive experience in building and scaling platforms or distributed systems with a strong focus on reliability, maintainability and performance
- Demonstrated success in driving engineering excellence and quality uplift across areas such as testing, observability, CI/CD, automation and software lifecycle management
- Hands-on experience partnering with architecture, product, security and infrastructure teams to deliver technology strategies and integrated solutions
- Deep understanding of modern engineering practices and toolchains, including agile/DevOps, cloud-native architecture (e.g., AWS, Azure), containerisation and infrastructure-as-code
- Experience governing engineering standards and technical compliance, including change, release, risk and audit requirements
- Strong track record of leading teams through transformation, such as shifting to domain-aligned ways of working, agile maturity uplift or legacy modernisation
Skills/Qualifications
- Tertiary qualifications in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related discipline (or equivalent experience)
- Exceptional leadership and people development skills, with the ability to coach senior technical talent and nurture a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture
- Advanced technical proficiency in modern engineering practices, including scalable system design, clean code, API-driven architecture and automated testing
- Strong understanding of platform security principles (such as secure-by-design), performance monitoring and operational resilience in high-availability environments
- Expertise in engineering governance, including quality assurance, risk and compliance controls and continuous delivery standards
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders, bridge technical and business needs and shape long-term strategies
- Strong knowledge of IT service management (ITSM), change management, and incident response frameworks, especially as they apply to platform operations
- Experience managing distributed teams or offshore capability models is desirable
- Professional certifications (e.g., SAFe, TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, or similar) are preferred but not essential
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: 174627
Employment Type: Full time