Staff Engineer

Responsibilities

• Deliver goals spanning a 6–18 month timeframe and help define the 12-month roadmap.
• Write well-tested, production-ready Rust code.
• Improve processes and tools for making sound decisions and safely changing high-risk code.
• Use observability data to inform decisions and measure shipped work.
• Investigate performance regressions and guide complex performance-versus-requirements tradeoffs.
• Champion operational excellence and participate in a one-week-in-six on-call rotation.
• Interview, mentor, and share knowledge with engineers.
• Develop and apply expertise in database and distributed-systems research.
• Handle or lead responses to time-sensitive customer escalations.
• Propose and advocate for high-impact cross-team projects and technical strategies.
• Drive consensus on complex, cross-team issues by framing tradeoffs and guiding durable decisions.
• Travel to the United States occasionally, approximately once per year.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience programming, debugging, and performance-tuning highly concurrent and/or distributed systems.
• Significant experience with a systems language such as C, C++, or Rust.
• A track record of effective technical leadership and solving ambiguous problems iteratively and measurably.
• Strong understanding of systems fundamentals, including cache management, log-based recovery, transactions, or performance profiling.
• Experience reasoning about highly concurrent, asynchronous services, including backpressure, tail latency, and replicated-state-machine failure modes.
• Experience with large, highly available, scalable, and performant systems such as databases, high-frequency trading platforms, cloud storage services, or similar systems.
• Excellent verbal and written technical communication skills.
• Willingness to collaborate with colleagues, mentor junior engineers, and learn new computer science and software engineering concepts.
• Candidates must be based in Sydney for the hybrid working model.

Benefits

• 5 weeks of annual leave.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave for both parents, covering childbirth, adoption, surrogacy, and fostering; reduced during the first year.
• Family-forming assistance covering fertility care, adoption, and surrogacy.
• Subsidized health and dental insurance for employees and dependents through Medibank.
• ClassPass credits, a Headspace subscription, and vaccination vouchers.
• In-office lunch up to 3 days per week.