Staff Software Engineer

Why Calcs Engineering and construction shape the world around us, yet many engineers still rely on outdated tools and time-consuming workflows. This creates inefficiency, risk, and frustration. We exist to fix that. Calcs is relied on by thousands of engineers, and we're building the next generation of engineering design tools — faster, safer, more collaborative, and increasingly powered by AI. This work is impactful and challenging. Standards differ by region, compliance matters, and correctness is non-negotiable. But our team is exceptional, and you'll work with people you trust, admire, and enjoy. We value ownership, autonomy, and outcomes over process. We treat each other like adults. Everyone contributes, whether it's shipping a major feature or taking out the bins. Why This Role Exists We have a strong product in market, new capabilities in active development, and ambitious plans to scale. The constraint now is not just execution capacity; it's senior technical leverage. We need someone who can take ownership of ambiguous, cross-cutting work, make good judgment calls without waiting for direction, and lift the quality and speed of the team around them. This hire will: Increase our ability to ship complex features customers are waiting forOwn workstreams that span product areas, systems, and teamsReduce key-person risk by spreading context, improving patterns, and building shared ownershipCreate leverage for the whole development team through better technical decisions and stronger execution defaults The Role We need a Staff-level software developer who can operate as a senior technical IC across the development team. You'll start with a strong focus on CalcsPlatform: reducing key-person risk, helping unlock foundational platform work, and building enough context to become a genuine senior operator and owner. From there, you'll flex into whatever other complex product streams need experienced hands. You're here to: own hard technical work, make good trade-offs, unblock others, and turn vague-but-important problems into shipped software. This is not a management role. It's not a pure architecture role. It's a senior IC role with high autonomy, broad ownership, and real responsibility for making the team more effective. What You'll Actually Work On Own foundational platform work. Help move CalcsPlatform forward, including infrastructure, identity, integration, and reliability work.Reduce key-person risk. Pair with domain owners, absorb context, document what matters, and build shared ownership in platform-critical areas.Ship across domains. Work on complex new product streams as pressure shifts. We're a small team; useful senior people do not stay inside narrow boxes.Create technical leverage. Improve patterns, unblock developers, and raise the quality of decisions being made across the team.Make ambiguous work concrete. Turn problems that start as "we need this to work" into scoped, sequenced, shipped outcomes. What We're Looking For Staff-level software judgment: You've built enough production software to know that seniority is not about writing more code. It's about knowing what matters, where the risk is, when to simplify, and when not to.Autonomy: You're comfortable with ambiguity and high trust. You can find the right people, ask the right questions, and create a plan without waiting for perfect instructions.Breadth: You can work across the stack and across product surfaces. Our stack includes Ruby/Rails, TypeScript/React, Python, APIs, data pipelines, and platform infrastructure.Technical leadership without people management: You make the people around you better. Your PRs teach. Your reviews improve the system, not just the diff. You can guide a technical decision without turning everything into a committee.Pragmatism: You care about clean systems, but you care more about useful systems. You value team success over individual credit. Nice to have, not required: Experience in B2B SaaS, especially serving technical or engineering usersExperience with developer tools, workflow platforms, integrations, identity, or platform infrastructureExperience reducing key-person risk in legacy or under-documented systemsExperience working in distributed/async teams What We're NOT Looking For "I only do backend" / "I only do frontend." We're too small for hard specialization."I want to manage people." This is a senior IC role, not a people-management role."I need detailed specs before I start." The work often starts before the spec exists.Hero developers who create more dependency.” The point is to reduce concentration of knowledge, not become the next single point of failure. Why This Job Is Interesting Your work changes the shape of the team. You will help the development function scale and make the team less dependent on a few overloaded people.The problems are real. Identity, integrations, platform reliability, customer commitments, and domain-heavy product work all matter here.Small team, big ownership. No waiting 6 months for a feature to ship. No committees. If you can own it, you can move it. Details Location: Australia / Australian time zone overlap requiredReports to: Head of Development