Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer Sydney | Hybrid | Permanent Java | Kotlin | GCP | React | TypeScript | Temporal Not every senior engineer wants to become an Engineering Manager. For many, the next step is becoming the technical leader that everyone turns to. The person solving the hardest engineering challenges, influencing architecture across multiple teams and raising the technical bar without taking on people management. If that's the path you want to pursue, this is an exceptional opportunity. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across a modern cloud-native engineering environment. You'll work alongside Engineering and Product leaders to shape technical direction, mentor senior engineers and influence architectural decisions that will impact the future of the platform. Alongside helping shape the long-term technical direction of the business, you'll also play a key role in delivering exciting greenfield platform initiatives. You'll have the opportunity to build new capabilities from the ground up, influence architectural decisions from day one and solve complex engineering problems that will have a lasting impact on the organisation. This is a true Individual Contributor leadership role. Your influence will come through your technical expertise, collaboration and engineering excellence, not direct reports. Whether you're already operating as a Staff Software Engineer, a Senior Software Engineer ready for the next step into technical leadership, or a Tech Lead who enjoys leading technology more than people, we'd love to hear from you. What you'll be doing Lead architectural decisions across distributed, event-driven systems.Champion engineering best practices, code quality and technical excellence.Drive the adoption of modern workflow orchestration and distributed systems patterns, including Temporal.io.Design scalable, resilient services using Kotlin and Java.Provide technical leadership across backend and frontend engineering teams.Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to balance technical strategy with product delivery.Mentor and coach senior engineers through design sessions, pair programming and code reviews.Help shape the future of our cloud platform and developer experience. You'll be working with a modern engineering stack including: Kotlin & JavaReact & TypeScriptGoogle Cloud Platform (GKE, Cloud SQL/Postgres, BigQuery)Temporal.ioEvent-driven architectureGitHub ActionsKubernetesModern CI/CD practices Experience with Temporal.io is highly desirable, however we're equally interested in engineers with strong experience across distributed systems, messaging platforms, workflow orchestration or event-driven architectures such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, Cadence or Airflow. You'll likely bring: Extensive commercial software engineering experience building complex distributed systems.Deep expertise in Java and/or Kotlin.Strong cloud-native engineering experience, ideally within GCP.Experience designing scalable, highly available platforms.A passion for improving engineering standards through mentoring and technical leadership.The ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.Excellent communication skills and the confidence to challenge technical decisions constructively. Most importantly, you'll enjoy solving difficult engineering problems and helping other engineers become better. Why this role? Many organisations expect senior engineers to move into people leadership. This role is different. You'll remain hands-on, solve complex technical problems, influence architecture at scale and help shape the engineering culture, all without inheriting performance reviews, leave approvals or people management responsibilities. If your ambition is to build your career as a technical leader while working on challenging greenfield engineering projects, get in touch!