Principal Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE
Permanent | Full-time | Hybrid | Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
We are looking for a Principal Engineer to act as the senior-most individual contributor within a product stream made up of multiple pods. This is a generalist, high-impact role for someone who enjoys raising the technical bar for others as much as solving problems themselves.

You will lead and drive the hardest technical challenges across the full delivery lifecycle: requirements analysis, high-level design, architecture, infrastructure, CI/CD, debugging, triage, production support, and monitoring.

Comfort with ambiguity is essential. You will be a key contributor to defining early product requirements and high-level technical direction as they evolve rapidly.

You will have significant autonomy in how you approach problems, while ensuring all designs align with enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, and security guidelines.

This role reports to the Engineering Manager for your product stream and responsibilities include: 

• Build excellence in the engineering teams you support, through technical design, review, and coaching
• Provide technical leadership from early requirements through to production, across the full delivery lifecycle
• Lead complex, multi-pod initiatives while requirements and technical direction are still taking shape
• Set engineering standards and best practices for the product stream
• Lead architecture and design reviews across the product stream, within enterprise, cloud, and security architecture guidelines
• Spot systemic risks in distributed, near-real-time systems and drive them to resolution
• Mentor and develop Tech Leads and Staff Engineers
• Support the Engineering Manager on the day-to-day technical issues that come up within the team
• Represent the product stream in cross-functional technical discussions
• Support hiring and technical interviewing

ABOUT YOU

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including TypeScript or a similar web stack language
• Experience providing technical direction for critical, business-facing systems, across multiple teams
• Microservices and event-driven architecture: service boundaries, async messaging, idempotency, ordering, and dead-letter handling
• RDBMS and NoSQL data modelling, including schema design and query performance
• API design and management, including REST and API gateway patterns
• Observability grounded in OpenTelemetry, plus familiarity with APM/dashboard tooling (Dynatrace, Grafana, or similar)
• AuthN/AuthZ, least-privilege IAM, and secrets management fundamentals
• Experience with Azure (desirable, but not essential)

Leadership qualities:  

• Works effectively across engineering, product, and architecture/security boundaries
• Good judgement on when to own a problem and when to bring in others to collaborate on it
• Communicates clearly with technical and non-technical audiences alike
• Builds trust through technical credibility, not authority

WHY WORK FOR PICKLES

Founded in 1964, Pickles is the largest auction marketplace in the Asia-Pacific region. Our clients include governments, banks, insurers, car manufacturers, and the largest infrastructure and constructions companies in the region. Our global workforce exceeds 1,000 staff with an annual sales turnover of AUD$2.7 billion. We are also the largest auction company in Malaysia, specializing in salvage, industrial equipment, machinery, and motor vehicles.

Malaysia is also home to our Centre of Excellence for Technology and Transformation. We are building a sophisticated next-generation auction platform to service the region. The solution is innovative, entrepreneurial, and boundary pushing.

For 50 years we have forged a national reputation for integrity and high business standards. Pickles’ quest for competitive excellence begins and ends with our unyielding commitment to ethical conduct in all our relationships.