Principal Software Engineer

Job Description
(Senior) Principal Software Engineer with Site Reliability Engineering and Distributed Systems expertise
a Little About Us
When it comes to food experience, me&u helps you always feel like a local. The company's vision is to bring that feeling to everyone, anywhere - so no matter what neighbourhood you live in or visit, you'll always know the perfect place to go and exactly what to order.

me&u is used by 6000+ bars, pubs, and restaurants to create memorable guest experiences and grow their brands. With 200 staff in five countries, and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, me&u is the consolidation of two leading hospitality technology companies: Mr Yum and me&u, who merged in November 2023.

About The Role
As a Principal Software Engineer at me&u, you will be pivotal in driving the development of our software products and ensuring their architectural resiliency, operational performance and efficiency. By working across all layers of our platform, you will ensure that our codebase, infrastructure, and services remain robust, efficient, and scalable. Your contributions will directly impact the user experience and the overall quality of our products, helping us maintain our competitive edge in the market

While we are looking for someone with deep SRE and Distributed Systems expertise, we believe in full-breadth engineers with multiple areas of expertise, who can deliver value end-to-end in a fully cross-functional team.

What You'll Do

• Work in every layer of our platform (infra to application) to help simplify and improve our platform to help it become more performant and have a better developer experience so that our teams can deliver effectively.
• System Reliability: Monitor system performance, availability, and capacity across production environments and turn insights from these into actionable improvements to our platform
• Automation & Monitoring: Design and implement automated monitoring, alerting, and incident response procedures.
• Incident Management: Lead post-incident reviews and drive implementation of preventive measures.
• Scalability & Collaboration: Collaborate with engineering teams to improve system scalability and reliability.
• Infrastructure Automation: Implement infrastructure as code and automated deployment strategies.
• Service Level Management: Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to balance feature velocity with system stability.
• Software Development & Quality: Write, test, and debug high-quality code while leading feature design and implementation that aligns with business goals.
• Code Reviews & Standards: Participate in code reviews, enforce coding conventions, and provide actionable feedback to improve codebase quality.
• Team Collaboration: Mentor less experienced engineers, manage project delivery independently, and foster a collaborative growth-oriented environment.

What You'll Need

• Architecture: Distributed Systems

• Deep expertise designing and operating scalable, resilient distributed systems in AWS. Additional experience in Azure would be an advantage.

• Solid grounding in distributed systems, microservices, and API design.

• Hands-on with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response. Not shy away from touching application layer code when needed.
• Experience managing containerised, Kubernetes based microservices platform
• Ability and desire to roll up your sleeves and jump in in a crisis, help resolve incidents, while building a sustainable, long term capability in the team to resolve similar issues independently of you in the future.

• SRE Capabilities:

• Experience with cloud service providers - AWS (must have), Azure (nice to have), GCP, or similar).

• Experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes (or similar).
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, or similar).
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation).
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).
• Understanding of incident management processes and on-call responsibilities.

• Experience with performance optimization and capacity planning.

• Technical Proficiency:

• Experience with backend programming languages such as TypeScript ), C#, Python, Ruby, or Java.

• Practical knowledge of basic security practices in web development.
• Experience with database systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB.
• Experience with observability principles in software engineering (metrics, logging, monitoring, tracing, alerting).
• Experience with version control systems like Git.

• Experience implementing RESTful APIs.

• Problem-Solving Skills: Ability to work on complex projects, tasks, and features.

• Collaboration Skills: Ability to regularly provide technical guidance and support to team members as well as mentoring less experienced engineers.
• Attention to Detail: Willingness to take responsibility for the quality of engineering solutions, considering performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Communication Skills: Ability to create system designs, perform code reviews, provide constructive feedback, and communicate with stakeholders.

• Experience with Distributed Systems: Familiarity working with distributed systems, their design and application. Including but not limited to:

• Knowledge of chaos engineering principles and tools.

• Experience with load testing and performance benchmarking.
• Familiarity with disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
• Familiarity with microservices architecture.

• Familiarity with unit testing frameworks and test-driven development.

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Experience with CI/CD pipelines.

NICE TO HAVE

• Exposure to Frontend Development. Including but not limited to:

• Front-end technologies including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• React for web application development.

• Experience in Agile Methodologies: Familiarity with agile development practices.

• Experience in a Product-Oriented Environment: Familiarity working with Product Managers, UX designers, and other key stakeholders.

WHY ME&U

Work with impact and purpose. We're helping the hospitality and entertainment industries to thrive and me&u is at the forefront of this. Expect collaboration and interesting problems to solve.

Work with great people. Work alongside a supportive, diverse and inclusive team. You'll have the trust, freedom and support to experiment and not be afraid of failure but to learn from have fun together along the way.

Work that challenges you. We're growing quickly, and you will too. You'll have numerous opportunities to embrace discomfort, grow and learn as me&u expands and scales globally.

Work that works for you. We're a flexible, remote-friendly place with inclusive leave options and day-to-day work times to suit your routine. We prioritise our team's mental health & overall wellbeing, with access to mental health days and support programs.

Diversity and Inclusion Commitment

We're committed to growing and empowering an inclusive me&u community. That's why we actively encourage applications from candidates from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you require accessibility assistance at any stage of the process, please let us know.