Ready to build the finance engine behind a high-growth global scale-up?

I’m hiring for a Financial Controller to join a fast growing technology business entering its next stage of international expansion.

This is a hands on role for someone who wants to be close to the business, not just reporting on the numbers but helping shape how finance operates as the company grows.

You’ll likely work across:

• Own month end, reporting and financial control, keeping the numbers accurate and the business well informed
• Keep a close eye on cash flow and improve financial visibility across the business
• Stay ahead of tax, compliance and reporting requirements as the company continues to scale
• Build smarter finance systems, stronger processes and better internal controls for the next stage of growth
• Give the leadership team clear commercial and financial insights to support better decision making
• Build the finance foundations needed to support international growth across new markets

We’re particularly interested in people who have worked in a startup, scale-up or high-growth technology environment and are comfortable balancing hands-on delivery with broader commercial thinking.

A CA/CPA background would be highly regarded, but just as important is someone pragmatic, adaptable and comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment.

If you’re a Financial Controller, Finance Manager or operational finance professional looking to step into a broader role, I’d love to hear from you.

Interested? Apply now or feel free to email Megan - megan@theonset.com.au

Principal Engineer – Java | Payments

Sydney | Permanent

Shape the Future of Payments Engineering

A leading financial services provider is investing in the next generation of its real-time payments platform and is looking for a Principal Engineer to help define what's next.

This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern software engineering, building highly scalable, cloud-native payment systems that process mission-critical financial transactions. You'll have the autonomy to shape technical strategy, influence architecture across multiple engineering teams and drive the adoption of emerging technologies—all while remaining hands-on and close to the code.

We're looking for an engineer who is passionate about solving complex technical challenges, enjoys driving innovation and is excited by how AI is transforming the software development lifecycle.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and build highly scalable Java services powering modern payment platforms.

• Drive architecture across distributed, event-driven microservices handling high-volume, low-latency transaction processing.

• Develop resilient payment orchestration capabilities supporting multiple payment rails and transaction flows.

• Shape technical roadmaps and influence engineering strategy across multiple teams.

• Lead complex engineering initiatives from concept through to production.

• Remain hands-on, contributing code while mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards.

• Champion AI-assisted software development, leveraging modern tooling to improve developer productivity and software quality.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to improve platform capability, scalability and customer outcomes.

• Ensure systems are secure, resilient and designed to meet the demands of large-scale financial services.

About You

You'll likely be operating as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Technical Architect or Senior Technical Lead with a passion for building large-scale distributed systems.

You'll bring:

• Expert Java and Spring Boot experience.

• Strong cloud engineering capability across AWS and/or GCP.

• Deep expertise in microservices, distributed systems, event-driven architecture and modern integration patterns.

• Experience building payment platforms, payment orchestration services or other high-throughput financial systems.

• A strong understanding of payment ecosystems, including card payments, issuer/acquirer integrations, Open Banking or real-time payment processing.

• Knowledge of secure software engineering practices for financial systems and mission-critical transaction processing.

• Proven experience driving architecture, influencing technical strategy and mentoring engineering teams while remaining hands-on.

• Practical experience embedding AI into the SDLC using modern engineering tools such as Claude Code, Roo Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.

Why Join?

This is more than a Principal Engineer role—it's an opportunity to shape the future of engineering within one of Australia's leading financial services organisations.

You'll work alongside high-calibre engineers solving complex distributed systems challenges, influence the technical roadmap of a business-critical payments platform and help define how emerging technologies and AI are embedded into modern software development.

If you're looking for a role where you can combine architectural leadership, hands-on engineering and genuine innovation, we'd love to hear from you.

Senior Java Engineer – AI & Automation Platforms (Contract)

Overview

We’re partnering with a leading financial services organisation currently investing heavily across backend engineering, AI integration, and automation capability.

As part of a broader uplift across enterprise platforms and intelligent workflow systems, they’re looking to engage several Senior Java Engineers on initial 12-month contracts.

These roles sit within high-performing engineering teams focused on building scalable, production-grade systems leveraging modern cloud architecture, AI-enabled tooling, and automation frameworks.

Day to day activities 

• Design and develop scalable backend applications and distributed systems using Java
• Build and integrate APIs, microservices, and cloud-native platform components
• Contribute to AI-enabled workflow and automation initiatives across enterprise environments
• Work closely with engineering, platform, and architecture teams on modernisation programs
• Support integration of LLM/GenAI capabilities into production systems and internal tooling
• Drive engineering best practices across performance, scalability, reliability, and security

Your career so far

• Strong commercial experience across Java engineering and backend system design
• Experience building scalable APIs and microservices architectures
• Exposure to cloud-native environments, ideally GCP
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and enterprise application architecture
• Experience working within complex engineering environments and agile delivery teams

Big bonus points 

• Experience working with LLMs/GenAI solutions in production environments
• Exposure to AI-driven automation or workflow orchestration platforms
• Experience with containerisation, Kubernetes, CI/CD, or DevOps tooling
• Background within financial services, enterprise SaaS, or high-scale platforms

Contract Details

• Initial 12-month contract engagements
• Up to 1150 inclusive of Super 
• Multiple positions available
• Sydney-based & Hybrid
• 3 days on site 

This is an opportunity to join a large-scale engineering program where AI capability is being embedded into real production systems, platforms, and operational workflows.

A global enterprise is growing its Cyber Threat Detection & Response team.

This isn't a traditional SOC where you'll spend your day clearing queues or chasing false positives. The fundamentals are already well covered, allowing the team to focus on higher-value work.

You'll investigate sophisticated threats, improve detection capabilities, hunt for adversary activity, and work closely with engineering teams to strengthen security controls. Depending on your experience, you'll either focus on deep technical investigations or lead the coordination of cyber security incidents, with opportunities to develop across both areas over time.

Tier 1 monitoring has largely been removed from the model, with technology owners responsible for first-line monitoring. That allows this team to concentrate on complex investigations, incident response, threat hunting and continuously improving the organisation's defensive capability.

This is a team that wants to understand how attackers operate, improve detection logic, and build stronger relationships across engineering, infrastructure and security teams—not simply work through an endless stream of routine alerts.

What they're looking for

• Experience investigating security incidents within a SOC, Cyber Defence or Incident Response environment.
• Strong SIEM experience (Splunk or similar), including alert investigation, detection tuning or rule creation.
• Hands-on EDR experience, with the ability to investigate endpoint activity and understand attacker behaviour.
• Strong understanding of phishing investigations, including analysing email headers, links, attachments and indicators of compromise.
• Knowledge of attacker tactics, techniques and procedures (MITRE ATT&CK).
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work with both technical teams and business stakeholders.

Whether your background is more technical investigation or incident response coordination, you'll join a mature cyber security function focused on solving complex security problems rather than simply responding to alerts.

russell@theonset.com.au / 0438984265

Senior Engineer – Practice Lead | Global Financial Services | Sydney

If you're a Principal or Lead Engineer in platform or DevOps, and you're tired of being the person holding everything together while everyone else goes home. This is worth reading.

A globally recognised financial services organisation is looking for someone to own its Telemetry and Analytics practice. That means platform and product ownership of enterprise-scale SIEM and threat intelligence platforms, a live and varied project pipeline, and a small, high-trust team that actually has its act together.

The person who held this role for the past two years told us it's the first job they've had in years where they weren't online every weekend dealing with something platform-related. The support infrastructure here is real. You're not carrying it alone.

What you'll be working on

There's a solid pipeline of technical work ahead. A credential management overhaul spanning source code, pipelines, and release infrastructure; a vendor platform migration; new platform delivery; and active POCs in flight. It's genuinely varied, and it's hands-on. You'll be designing, integrating, and developing platforms rather than babysitting them.

Day to day you'll be working across IaC, CI/CD pipelines, containerisation, and scripting. Building and maintaining the infrastructure that underpins security operations at enterprise scale. You'll work closely with a small, experienced team across Australia and the US, and interface with detection engineers, analysts, and senior stakeholders globally.

What this does for your career

The brand carries weight. Two years here, owning platforms at this scale, delivering complex projects, and operating within a world-class financial services environment is a credible and visible step toward a Director or Principal Architect role. The person before you used it exactly that way.

What you'll bring

A strong DevOps, platform, or release engineering background. Solid hands-on experience with IaC (Terraform, Puppet, or Ansible), CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and Linux. Proficiency in Python or Shell. You've worked in an enterprise environment, financial services, insurance, banking, or similar scale and complexity. And you're fluent in governance and compliance without being slowed down by it.

You don't need a security specialism. If you've operated SIEM, log pipelines, or observability platforms from a platform engineering angle, that experience is relevant. You will grow your domain knowledge with this role.

Hit apply or send me a message and I'll get you the full brief.

Julien@theonset.com.au - 0406 158 832

 Lead Python/Full Stack Engineering role sitting inside security. You’re not expected to be a pure cybersecurity specialist or an AI researcher. They want someone who can build production-grade software in Python, then use LLMs and AI agents to automate parts of security assessment and help identify risks that haven’t been surfaced through existing processes. You’d own the tooling end-to-end — architecture, APIs, data pipelines, agent workflows, deployment and ongoing operation.who can build AI-powered security tooling. The person will work across the security division, using AI agents and automation to analyse systems, applications and security data, with the goal of uncovering risks, vulnerabilities or patterns that traditional tools and manual reviews may have missed.