The Role
Tanda is hiring a Senior+ SRE for our Platform Infrastructure Team (PIT). We’re a bootstrapped company that has been funded by customers for over a decade. In the last 2 years Tanda has released two new Software Products to complement our Workforce Management product - Payroll and HR.. Our product team works on our Workforce Management, HR and Payroll products and deploys 30+ changes per day. PIT is a pivotal team that ensures our business critical products are reliably available to our customers, and our engineering team has the right tooling.
We will only be considering candidates who are based in Brisbane (or willing to relocate), and excited to work in the office the majority of the time. Tanda values moving fast, and our interview process reflects that. It’s two steps - a 30min phone call with the hiring manager, and then if that goes well an in office pair programming session with the hiring manager and another member of the team.
The lowest end of the salary range for this role is $150k + Super.
Read about our 11 year journey here: https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/11-years-of-hosting-a-saas
The Work
At Tanda we like boring and predictable technology. Our product is a Ruby on Rails Monolith deployed on EC2 instances with PostgreSQL on RDS hosted on AWS. In 2025, the major PIT project is containerizing our workload, and overhauling our Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform.
There is an on call rotation. The rotation is 1 week at a time, only during business hours (this also includes weekends). The on-call PIT member will be paired with a developer on-call to help navigate application code.
What did we do during 2024?

• Refactored our background jobs to use Latency budgets to queue and scale workloads
• Running Rails with multi-threading enabled
• Major database upgrade from Postgres 15 to Postgres 16 using a blue/green cutover strategy
• Overhauled our CI system to use a standardised set of containers
• Starting a project to use database partitions
• Lots of performance work at the application level to fix expensive database queries & slow code paths
• Running Ruby on Rails at the edge - following in the steps of companies like Github, Shopify & Stripe
• Worked with Nate Berkopec, who has written multiple books about Rails performance, to help solve some of our most challenging performance issues

What are we building in 2025?

• Overhauling our IaC from CloudFormation to Terraform & migrating our production workload to the new environments
• Containerizing our workload & modernising our application deployment stack to run containers on ECS
• Doing another major upgrade of our Postgres databases
• Spinning up a new AWS region & migrating customers from one database in a separate AWS account to a fresh instance

What scale do we operate at?

• Two AWS regions - APAC & Europe
• Our APAC workload is consistently running at ~40,000 RPM
• Millions of background jobs processed per day
• Some of Australia’s largest employers use our product - Domino’s, GYG, Best & Less, and Starbucks are just a few of the companies we work with

About You
You do not need a university degree for this role - we value real world impact and projects over certificates.
While we have a preference for candidates with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL experience, you should have experience working with a major MVC framework running on a relational database at scale. You understand common failure modes in these frameworks, and have experience battling performance problems at the application level as well as at the infrastructure level.
We’re looking for someone who can bring a fresh perspective to not only PIT but our broader engineering team.
You can expect to have a lot of ownership over your work. We enjoy working with curious people who take initiative and demand a high bar for themselves and the team they work with.
Why Apply?
See your impact
We’re a small engineering team, but our product is global. You can personally have a huge impact on our customers’ productivity.
We’re not always sprinting
Our development cycle uses the Shape Up framework. Unlike a lot of “agile” frameworks - we have dedicated ‘cool-down’ time to breathe; using it to fix bugs, refactor, focus on professional development, and try out new technical possibilities.
Experience amazing opportunities
We recognise when people are exceptional, and as a scale-up, we’re flexible enough to give people new opportunities to excel, both in existing teams and in new teams/roles.
Solve deep and interesting problems
Workforce management is an innovative industry, and creative solutions are a necessity to thrive.
Further Benefits
✓ Real projects: We hire based on real demand, not based on arbitrary hiring rounds
✓ Experience: You won’t be shielded from customers or responsibility
✓ Culture: You will be part of a team that is passionate about what they do and don’t suffer boredom easily
✓ Team retreat: a full company retreat usually held at a coastal location for two nights
✓ Professional Development: an annual professional development budget per person, industry conferences, and support for those who want to speak at conferences representing Tanda
About Tanda
Tanda is an established, fast-growing tech company. We are on a mission to build Australia’s leading all-in-one workforce management platform. Our vision is to eliminate employment friction for shift and hourly workers, reducing the world’s unemployment rate. Our main activities centre around engineering, marketing, sales, research, and supporting functions. We build software that helps businesses manage their rostering, time & attendance, staffing optimisation, employee engagement, payroll, and labour compliance.
We service thousands of Australian clients from our Brisbane headquarters and globally with offices in Chicago and London.
If these challenges sound interesting - reach out to us for a chat!