Staff Backend Engineer

Position: Staff Backend Engineer Reporting Line This role reports to Co-founder and Engineering Lead Location: Sydney (Hybrid) 📦 About Unpac Unpac is a climate tech startup on a mission to accelerate the shift to a circular economy by enabling brands to design and develop sustainable products, starting with packaging. We are building the Packaging Action OS: a system of record that turns fragmented packaging data into intelligent, actionable outputs that cut costs, increase margins, and unlock sustainable design. Our purpose-built software gathers, converts, and collates raw packaging data of any type into an accurate Single Source of Truth (SSoT) so brands and their partners can use it effectively for EPR compliance obligations and other optimization pathways that cut costs and increase sustainability of their packaging. Our end to end SaaS offering replaces slow, costly, and error-prone manual data collection with an intuitive, easy-to-use digital service that is already 150x faster than manual processes, saving brands hundreds of hours and reducing costs by up to 85%. 📍Where we’re at We have established a foothold in the USA market with a few lighthouse enterprise customers and are expanding in the EU market with brands looking for accurate and organised data to meet urgent compliance requirements. Demand is snowballing. Right place, right time, right customers. Dream scenario. While our product is functional and working, we are looking to evolve our product to meet the more sophisticated needs of our enterprise customers. The next step is a packaging data hub: one platform that every packaging decision, compliance report, and optimization runs through, for every customer, in every region. Architecture decisions made in the next twelve months decide whether Unpac gets there. That is the platform this role design and builds with us 🧑‍💻Overview of the role You own the architecture and the roadmap from the current product to the long-term data hub, and will be translating our MVP into a mature product. You set the data model, the data contracts, the ingestion layer, and the infrastructure pattern that lets Unpac onboard an enterprise customer in weeks, pass an enterprise security review, and run isolated environments in the US and the EU. You work alongside our Engineering Lead, who runs the day-to-day engineering function and the AI/ML pipeline, so that the platform can carry 50x today's customers without a rebuild. Fundamentally, this is a role for a builder who enjoys rolling their sleeves up and delivering hands-on execution. It is not a people-management role today, although you will set the standards a growing team inherits 🏛️Responsibilities Write and own the architecture roadmap from today's product to the data hub, in clear steps, and get it adopted by the team and the founders.Balance immediate business needs with long term system maintainability.Design the canonical packaging data model and data contracts (SKU, component, material, supplier, jurisdiction, obligation) that become the single source of truth for customers and partners.Design and build the ingestion and integration layer: spreadsheets, PDFs, spec management systems (Specright, Trace One), ERP and PLM exports, partner APIs.Move the platform from early-stage serverless functions to a service architecture that scales (containerised services, queues, event-driven jobs) without stalling delivery.Own multi-region and data-residency design (US and EU isolated environments) and the security controls needed for SOC 2/ISO 27001 and enterprise due diligence.Define migration, versioning, and schema-change practices so customer data integrity never breaks.Partner with the Engineering Lead on the ML pipeline foundations: training data, model versioning, evaluation, monitoring.Set engineering standards for reviews, observability, and testing without adding bureaucracy.Be customer-facing when needed: technical due diligence, integration workshops, architecture Q&A with enterprise IT and security teams.Mentor engineers as the team grows and remove single points of failure in backend knowledge. ✔ Required experience 8+ years of backend engineering, including 3+ years designing data-intensive, multi-tenant B2B SaaS platforms.Deep PostgreSQL: data modelling, performance, migrations, row-level security. Supabase experience is a plus.TypeScript and Node.js in production (Nest.js or a similar framework).AWS at depth: containerised services (ECS/Fargate), serverless, IAM and OIDC, and infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK).ETL/ELT and event-driven pipelines: idempotent jobs, queues, data quality checks, reprocessing.API design and integrations with enterprise systems (ERP, PLM, spec management).Security and compliance posture for enterprise sales: SOC 2, ISO 27001, or equivalent.You have taken a product from early architecture to scale at a startup, and you can say plainly what you would do differently next time.You have previously worked on projects with complex back-end systems; e.g. telco, energy, etc. Nice to havePackaging, EPR, sustainability, or other regulated-data domains.OpenSearch, DynamoDB, or similar secondary stores.LLM or ML pipeline infrastructure, including Python data services.Experience running technical due diligence with enterprise procurement and security teams. 🧭 Attributes we value Driven by experimentation and iteration to get results. You make evidence-based decisions and learn from them, incorporating the insights into your next attempt.Clear and strong communication. You can make non-technical people understand engineering tradeoffs in conversation and through stand alone written communication. Intellectually curious, possess a “figure it out” mindset. You’re not afraid to say, “I don’t know - but I’ll figure it out.” You always ask “why?” and look to upend the status quo.You possess a bias for action. Be assertive and take calculated risks in order to move with velocity; speed and direction.Grittiness. We are on a journey filled with incessant challenges – we are looking for a resilient person who is keen for the challenging journey ahead, the ups and the downs.Passionate about a sustainable future. Unpac exists to shift the sustainability paradigm from talk to action; we are looking for missionaries not mercenaries.Take pride in your work Deliver results you are proud of (even if they are rushed, ugly, etc) pride should be defined as your best effort to achieve the criteria you believe in. 📈 Why join Unpac? You want to be a changemaker and build something epic. Get in on a company creating a means for true action in the fight against climate change.You want to be involved in a company that moves at velocity and is thinking on a global scale. Focused on the USA at the moment, but will be in European markets by the end of year.We are product-led. You are as obsessive as we are in building an application that our customers love to use; you strive to deliver delightful user experiences.You seek greenfield development. Deliver tangible impact by creating an innovative product for good, it’s in our DNA to push the boundaries of what technology can deliver.You are seeking a role with technical authority and autonomy. Whether you are currently working in a larger team and don’t have many opportunities to take on a lead role, or you’re a startup vet who loves the work of moving a company from 1 to 10, we seek a teammate who wants the responsibility.Grow with us. Be in the driver’s seat evolving your career alongside the company.No Bull. No corporate bureaucracy, nothing but getting the job done.