Staff Backend Engineer - Foundations

Why join us? We're a global tech company, just not the kind you're picturing. Our almost 1,000-person team builds tools that make work better for the three billion frontline workers who keep the world moving. We've got big tech scale, without the sign-off layers or corporate theatre. Every permanent team member gets equity, so when we grow, you do too. This next chapter is about scaling smart, powered by AI, a clear vision and real ownership. Big tech impact, without the big tech ick. The Role Our mission and your opportunity are to help solve the challenges faced in an increasingly distributed workforce by building the platform that powers how teams work safely and productively every day. We empower engineers to learn new skills and use technology - including IoT, machine learning, and event-driven architectures - to solve real customer problems. As a Staff Engineer in the Foundations Group, this role is responsible for the user and organisation management systems the rest of the platform is built on – how a user is created, identified, authenticated, organised and managed at scale. They set the architecture, define the canonical user and organisation data model, and lead the migration off legacy services without disruption to customers. By partnering closely with product and engineering teams across the platform, they reduce fragmentation, make secure and standards-based patterns the default, and lift the ceiling on the size of organisation SafetyCulture can serve. You’ll face exciting technical challenges as we scale, and be an integral part of high-performing teams that own their services end-to-end and are trusted to run systems that serve hundreds of thousands of users today, millions in the near future. You’ll work with a modern tech stack including Golang and Node.js on the backend, identity and access technologies such as Auth0, OpenID Connect and SAML, AWS, Kafka and Kubernetes for infrastructure, OpenSearch for search, and datastores such as DynamoDB and PostgreSQL. What You'll Do Architect, build, and operate large-scale SaaS and cloud services, including distributed systems, data stores, and event-driven components.Own the architecture for core user management – user lifecycle, organisation and membership structures, provisioning, and authentication flows such as login, signup, multi-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) – and set the standards other teams build on.Define the canonical user and organisation data model, resolving fragmentation that today slows the delivery of every user-dependent feature.Lead safe, incremental migration off legacy user and identity services, with backward compatibility and staged cutover rather than big-bang releases.Identify and facilitate architectural decisions within a team or tribe and communicate them clearly.Champion and communicate our technology strategy, connecting engineering decisions to real customer and business value.Own delivery of complex features and systems - breaking down requirements, providing realistic estimates, and ensuring safe, repeatable releases.Lead key architectural decisions that enable multiple teams to move independently with high autonomy, while maintaining consistency, reliability and performance, including defining patterns and platforms that enable safe adoption of AI-powered components across teamsPromote a culture of review, feedback and continuous learning: improve others’ ability to deliver great work by mentoring, pairing, and setting high standards for design and code.Spread domain knowledge deliberately, so that critical user management systems are understood by enough of the team to be sustainable.Demonstrate SafetyCulture’s values (Think Customer, Open Honest Always, Better as a Team, Be Bold Bring Action) in how you lead through influence, not authority.Drive initiatives that improve release-safety, repeatability and operational excellence, including observability, performance and reliability practices.Bring a user- and customer-centric mindset to platform work, ensuring foundational capabilities make it easier and safer for product teams to ship value at scale.Drive adoption of AI in engineering workflows and products: identify high-leverage use cases, enable teams with tooling and guardrails, and integrate AI capabilities (e.g., code generation, analysis, observability, and product features) to improve developer productivity, system quality, and customer value. About You Depth of knowledge in a backend programming language and associated frameworks (e.g. Golang, Node.js or similar), and a track record of building robust, maintainable services.Proven experience designing, building and running SaaS or cloud services at scale, ideally in a microservice or service-oriented architecture.Depth in user management, identity or access at platform scale – user and organisation modelling, provisioning and lifecycle, or authentication standards such as SSO, OpenID Connect and OAuth, SAML and multi-factor authentication – and an understanding of how these shape platform and product design.Experience building multi-tenant systems where user, organisation and membership boundaries have to hold under scale and change.A track record of migrating production systems off legacy foundations without customer disruption, using techniques such as dual-write, backward compatibility and staged cutover.Ability to guide data architecture decisions across teams to establish patterns that enable safe, high-throughput system design at scale.Experience diagnosing and removing scale constraints in high-volume systems – for example membership resolution, search, or data-access paths in organisations with well over a hundred thousand users.A strong track record leading complex, high-impact initiatives across multiple teams with clear customer and business outcomes.Experience working in a technical leadership capacity – influencing architecture, quality and ways of working beyond your immediate team, without relying on formal authority.Ability to articulate effort vs impact trade-offs and help teams and stakeholders make pragmatic decisions.A high-leverage mindset: you measure your impact by how much you accelerate others, reduce complexity, and improve system-level outcomes, not by the volume of code you personally write.Strong mentoring and coaching skills, with a history of raising the bar for engineering practices and helping others grow.Behaviours aligned with high-trust, high-impact teams – focusing on what moves the needle, sharing thinking early and often, and avoiding perfectionism that slows meaningful progress. Staff Engineers at SafetyCulture are measured by the impact they create across teams, groups and systems – not by how much code they write. If you bring strong backend fundamentals, depth in the user and identity space, a high-leverage mindset, and a track record of raising the bar around you, we’d love to talk. We’re committed to building inclusive teams and cultivating a sense of belonging so our people can bring their whole authentic selves to work each day. We seek to make reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process to create an even playing field for all candidates. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the entire SafetyCulture team we’ve built an incredible culture which has seen us recognised as a Best Place to Work in Australia , the US and the UK . Even if you don't meet every requirement listed in the ad, please consider applying for this role. We prioritise inclusion and value individuals with potential over a checklist of qualifications. Don't rule yourself out, hit that apply button if this job resonates with you You can find out more about life at SafetyCulture via Youtube , Twitter , Instagram and LinkedIn. To all recruitment agencies, we do not accept resumes or partnership opportunities. Please do not forward resumes to SafetyCulture or any of our employees. We are not responsible for any fees associated with unsolicited resumes.