Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Dogs, cats, budgies and everything in between - pets deserve the world. They make us want to be better humans. That's why we've made it our mission to build the most engaged and passionate community of pets and pet parents across the world. And we're looking for talented team mates who can help us do it.

Founded in Sydney, our team of 500+ pet obsessives span Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. We've scaled to become one of Australia's top five eComm companies and the no.1 online pet store. But we're just getting started. Like a whippet who's spotted their mate across the dog park, our growth is only going to accelerate, as we continue to disrupt the way that pet parents shop.

Excitingly, the pet industry is booming (as in $15 billion kind of booming) and online pet retail is set to grow exponentially in the next five years. So this is a unique career opportunity to be part of our epic growth story.

The opportunity
As a Staff Engineer for the backend, you are the technical owner of our core backend platform. Your role is to solve the most complex, ambiguous, and high-impact problems, acting as a force multiplier for multiple teams. The ideal candidate is obsessed with quality and driven by a customer-first mindset. You are a natural leader who thrives on ambiguity and can break down complex problems into clear, executable strategies. You have a passion for pioneering new technology, especially the use of AI to enhance engineering practices. You are a bridge-builder, capable of translating technical vision to senior leadership and aligning technical strategy with business goals.

What You'll Be Doing

• Define the technical vision and architectural standards for the backend stack, ensuring it is scalable, resilient, and performant.
• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, company-wide initiatives, such as service migrations, major API overhauls, and the development of shared platform services.
• Utilize Agentic AI coding tools to accelerate development, review designs with AI, and pioneer new ways to integrate AI into our core systems and development workflows.
• Drive quality, process, observability, and tooling for your domain, owning uptime and incident response for the backend platform.
• Lead the Backend Chapter, fostering a community of technical excellence, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring consistent best practices across all backend squads.
• Collaborate with the Director of Engineering, Tech Leads, and Product Managers to balance feature delivery, engineering quality, and platform stability.

The ideal toolkit

• We are looking for a seasoned engineer with a proven track record of solving hard problems and leading technical teams.
• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating complex distributed systems at scale
• Deep expertise in at least one backend language (e.g., TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Rust) and a strong understanding of others.
• Proficiency with cloud infrastructure (e.g., GCP, AWS), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with a variety of data storage technologies, including both SQL and NoSQL databases
• A history of leading significant technical projects from ideation through to launch
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and guide the technical growth of senior engineers.

Role location
We believe that building connections and collaborating as Pet Circlers is super important. So this role is based in Sydney with a hybrid arrangement of 1 or more days per week in our pet friendly offices (your pet might love coming to the office even more than you). This is subject to change in line with business requirements.

Juicy perks

• Heaps of development opportunities - stretch projects, secondments and unlimited learning courses via Go1
• Flexible working environment
• Up to 50% employee discount
• Product sample giveaways
• Pawrental leave and wellbeing leave
• Team charity volunteer days
• Classpass subsidy

Why Join?
We Reckon Our Mission To Help The World Pet Better Is An Important One, But Also An Incredibly Fun And Rewarding One. Becoming a Pet Circler Means You're Committed To Help Shape An Entire Industry - It's Pretty Exciting Stuff. Here's What We Stand For

• We're better together
• We operate with humble hearts and hungry minds
• Pets matter' so pets and pet parents always have a seat at our table
• We're instinctively curious. Always.

Belong at Pet Circle
Our unique perspectives and expertise is our superpower - we value diversity in all forms. So, no matter your background, please apply if this role makes you excited to bring your full self to work each day.