Senior / Staff Engineer

AI Start-up

$220k + equity

Sydney Based - Hybrid

Are you a senior / staff engineer who thrives in autonomy, loves solving technically challenging problems, and wants to help shape the future of AI-first collaboration tools?

If so, you could be joining an early-stage, product-led company building an orchestration engine that helps teams bring AI into real-time workflows and decision-making. It’s not just experiments, but production-critical tools used by fast-moving businesses.

They’re solving problems most teams haven’t even encountered yet. This isn’t “feature delivery” it’s “how do we orchestrate real-time AI decisions across a distributed system, and make it fast, reliable, and actually usable?” You’re coming in as an engineer and being a founding member of something big

This role leans backend (Node.js, PostgreSQL, Azure), but we’re looking for engineers who like to work across the stack and want to go deep on AI integration, distributed systems, and real-time collaboration.

What You’ll Work On

You’ll join a small, senior team working directly with the technical founder to build:

• Real-time, event-driven collaboration features for cross-functional teams
  
  
  
  
• A scalable orchestration layer for large language models (OpenAI, Claude, LLaMA)
  
  
  
  
• High-performance APIs and backend services that process complex AI workflows
  
  
  
  
• Infrastructure that supports 99.9% uptime across critical services
  
  
  
  
• Tools that help end-users understand, interact with, and guide AI-generated decisions
  
  
  
  

This is a high-ownership role. You’ll architect, ship, and optimise features that directly impact our customers.

Why Join?

• You’ll work on some of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure and real-time collaboration
  
  
  
  
• You’ll join a product-focused team with a strong engineering culture and minimal red tape
  
  
  
  
• You’ll ship real things, not just proof-of-concepts
  
  
  
  
• You’ll grow with a company that’s scaling fast — and helping others do the same
  
  

The Setup

• Hybrid role – It’s based in Sydney, and you’ll be in the office 3–4 days a week for high-bandwidth collaboration.
  
  
  
  
• Flexible working – Outside of that, we trust you to get the work done however works best for you.
  
  
  
  
• Early-stage upside – Competitive salary + equity in a high-impact AI company.
  
  
  
  
• Lean, expert team – You’ll be working with senior engineers and a hands-on technical founder.
  
  
  

About You

You’re probably someone who:

• Has 5+ years of experience in backend-heavy, full-stack roles, ideally across multiple domains
  
  
  
  
• Has owned complex systems end-to-end, from database to deployment
  
  
  
  
• Enjoys reasoning about architecture, but can dive in and debug low-level issues when needed
  
  
  
  
• Loves exploring new tools, libraries, and ideas - the stack includes Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Langchain, Azure, and React
  
  
  
  
• Has experience (or strong interest) in integrating AI/LLM services and building distributed systems
  
  
  
  
• Writes clean, maintainable code and values performance, reliability, and user impact
  
  
  
  
• Thrives in fast-paced, high-autonomy environments where you can move quickly and wear multiple hats
  
  
  
  

Bonus points if you’ve worked with pgvector, real-time pub/sub systems, or deployed systems on Azure.

Sound like your kind of challenge?
Apply now — we’d love to hear from you.