Principal Engineer

About Envato

At Envato, everything we do is about empowering creatives to thrive. We're here to help creatives bring their ideas to life, supercharge their workflows, and equip them with an unparalleled toolkit they can use anywhere. With unlimited access to world-class assets, innovative AI tools, and hands-on tutorials, we deliver what creatives need today - and are continually evolving our offering. As AI transforms the creative landscape, we’re committed to building what’s next for the future.

We’re a purpose-driven company and we’ve long embraced flexible, inclusive ways of working. We’re proud of the connected culture we’ve built across our global team. Our values: Community Spirit, Build Our Future, Embrace Diversity, Make It Happen, and Make Envato Proud, guide everything we do, shaping how we work, grow, and succeed.

You can read more about us on our blog, including news of our acquisition by Shutterstock Inc in 2024.

About The Role

As an AI-first engineering organisation, Envato is redefining how we build software. As the Principal Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy to maximise the utility of AI across our engineering teams. From agentic development practices to AI-powered product experiences. Driving the adoption of the latest approaches, methodologies, and tools.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead technical direction across multiple teams and services, shaping high-level architecture and ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, and aligned with Envato’s engineering strategy.
• Stay hands-on with code, contributing to key codebases, building prototypes, and validating architectural decisions through practical experimentation.
• Champion an AI-first adoption across engineering. This includes evaluating AI coding agents, establishing patterns for agent-directed development, context engineering practices, and ensuring AI integration is done with appropriate engineering rigour (testing, reliability, security).
• Solve complex, high-impact technical challenges across distributed systems, balancing scale, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to align technical decisions with business strategy and deliver solutions that create real customer and commercial value.
• Elevate engineering standards across teams, guiding design reviews, sharing best practices, and helping establish consistent principles and “golden paths.”
• Mentor and support Lead Engineers and senior developers, growing technical capability across the organisation through coaching and collaboration.
• Drive cross-team initiatives and complex projects, influencing multiple teams to deliver cohesive, high-quality systems at scale.

About You

You have extensive experience (typically 15+ years) leading and delivering large-scale web applications. You have a proven track record of managing complex, cross-team projects from design through to release. You have demonstrated experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows. You should be actively using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar), with a strong understanding of how to adopt them effectively at an organisational level, including experience with multi-agent (swarm) orchestration development approaches. You have strong commercial sense, with the ability to balance technical decisions against business outcomes. You are skilled at solving ambiguous, large-scale technical problems with data-informed, objective analysis. You are a mentor at heart who has successfully grown the technical skills of senior and lead-level engineers.

Life at Envato

• Flexible Working: remote-first across Australia or New Zealand with flexibility for you to manage work and life as you need.
• Work from Anywhere: apply to work in another location for up to 3 months per calendar year.
• Connection Budget: an annual budget to connect with the team IRL where and when possible.
• Learning Budget: study leave and an annual budget for you to put towards your learning and development.
• Home Office Allowance: a contribution towards your set-up and a monthly allowance to support work from home costs.
• Wellbeing: access to a holistic assistance program that provides support in many areas of life and health.
• Volunteer Leave: 2 days per calendar year to volunteer and give back to the community.
• Parental Leave: 20 weeks paid primary carer leave, and 6 weeks paid secondary carers leave.

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Key skills/competency

• Principal Engineer
• AI Strategy
• Software Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• AI-Assisted Development
• Agentic Development
• Technical Leadership
• Mentorship
• Web Applications
• Cross-functional Collaboration