Sounds like you've got a great range of experience, both broad and in-depth so I imagine you can pretty much pick and choose your job offers/contract gigs. I'm also wondering what a career outside of software might look like in the future - if you have any initial ideas I'd be interested to hear them.
I moved to Sydney at the end of 2018, have been working mostly with Python for the best part of 10 years (previously in the UK) and also have landed in data engineering. I also still do some web dev and act as a tech lead. I don't mind the data side of things and I get to work with (Azure|AWS|GCP) and their various data-realated technologies on a daily basis. I haven't worked with Kafka as nowhere I've worked has had a need for it so far, but having said that I've also done stuff with Kubernetes which was probably overkill too in retrospect.
I know they have slightly different use cases but if you don't like Ansible, have you used Terraform? Hashicorp have started to dominate in some areas of DevOps tooling and as you know it has a lot of traction, although I can't think of many companies using it in anger in Australia off the top of my head.
I don't work here so this isn't an ad for the company, but this is an example Java job description I saw recently https://www.todaysplan.com.au/jobs/ No mention of Spring which is a bonus for you, but I imagine there'd be a pay cut from what you're on now. I've heard some Canberra-based jobs pay relatively well but the average could be skewed by some of the high paying government jobs.
What would be an interesting role for you? There must be some companies in Sydney using Rust/Golang or similar if Python ETL isn't what you like doing.
I moved to Sydney at the end of 2018, have been working mostly with Python for the best part of 10 years (previously in the UK) and also have landed in data engineering. I also still do some web dev and act as a tech lead. I don't mind the data side of things and I get to work with (Azure|AWS|GCP) and their various data-realated technologies on a daily basis. I haven't worked with Kafka as nowhere I've worked has had a need for it so far, but having said that I've also done stuff with Kubernetes which was probably overkill too in retrospect.
I know they have slightly different use cases but if you don't like Ansible, have you used Terraform? Hashicorp have started to dominate in some areas of DevOps tooling and as you know it has a lot of traction, although I can't think of many companies using it in anger in Australia off the top of my head.
I don't work here so this isn't an ad for the company, but this is an example Java job description I saw recently https://www.todaysplan.com.au/jobs/ No mention of Spring which is a bonus for you, but I imagine there'd be a pay cut from what you're on now. I've heard some Canberra-based jobs pay relatively well but the average could be skewed by some of the high paying government jobs.