Staff Engineer, Full Stack

Senior Lead Engineer – Full Stack
About REA Group
In 1995, in a garage in Melbourne, Australia, REA Group was born from a simple question:  “Can we change the way people experience property?”
Thirty years later, REA Group is a global digital real estate leader operating across multiple continents, building large-scale, consumer-facing platforms used by millions every day.
Our success comes from staying true to a  day-one mindset —combining innovation, curiosity, and long-term thinking to evolve complex systems that power critical customer journeys.
REA Cyber City  is an extension of REA Group’s global technology organisation. Teams here work closely with counterparts in Australia and other regions to design, build, and operate core platforms and capabilities. Engineers in Cyber City contribute directly to REA’s long-term technology strategy, solving real-world problems at scale and shaping systems that need to perform, adapt, and endure over time.
If you’re excited by the challenge of building resilient systems, working on meaningful problems, and growing with a global engineering organisation—read on.

What the role is all about
We’re seeking a  Senior Lead / Staff Engineer  who operates as a  squad architect and systems thinker , owning complex technical problems end-to-end and shaping the evolution of REA’s platforms s role is designed for a senior individual contributor who leads primarily through  technical depth, architectural judgement, and operational ownership . The focus is on designing, building, evolving, and operating reliable systems over time—while influencing engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and enabling predictable delivery across squads.
You will work closely with engineers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and stakeholders to solve domain-wide problems and ensure systems remain scalable, secure, and maintainable as REA continues to grow.

Core Behavioural Signals
Shapes architecture and ensures long-term technical direction aligned with platform and domain goals.
Drives system health, stability, performance, and maintainability.
Solves domain-wide and cross-team technical problems.
Enforces quality, standards, and strong engineering practices.
Resolves complex dependencies across squads and systems.
Influences technical strategy and represents engineering in decision forums.

What you’ll do
Technical Execution
Design, build, review, and operate production-grade full-stack systems using modern engineering practices.
Own delivery of complex, high-impact features and subsystems, leading by example in code quality, correctness, and performance.
Work hands-on across frontend and backend codebases using technologies such as React, JavaScript, Type Script, Node.js, and Java.
Drive high engineering standards through pairing, deep code reviews, and clear technical guidance.
Design & Architecture
Own architecture decisions for complex systems, documenting and communicating trade-offs through design reviews and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
Shape subsystem and platform-level architecture aligned with REA’s long-term technical strategy.
Evaluate and articulate trade-offs across performance, reliability, security, cost, and maintainability.
Design and evolve APIs, services, and data flows that scale across teams and domains.
Design or contribute to event-driven and asynchronous architectures; experience with streaming platforms (e.g. Kafka) is a plus.
System Ownership & Operational Excellence
Own production systems end-to-end, including reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and technical debt management.
Own application performance across the stack by identifying bottlenecks, driving optimisations, and ensuring systems meet latency and scalability targets.
Design and operate containerised workloads using Docker and Kubernetes in production environments.
Ensure systems are observable, resilient, and designed for safe failure and recovery.
Champion continuous improvement in operational practices and developer experience.
Delivery Leadership
Contribute to planning and sequencing of work, helping teams balance scope, quality, and delivery timelines.
Identify cross-team dependencies and…