Staff Software Engineer

We are growing our engineering team and on the lookout for a staff engineer to take our company to the next level.

At Freelancer, we’re building the world’s biggest marketplace for services, connecting talent all across the world with jobs. We’re working  on a highly diverse, global set of internet-scale challenges, making a meaningful difference to the world, with real responsibility. We’re also changing lives - our mission is to provide one billion jobs. Not many companies actually make a difference like Freelancer does in providing opportunity and income to people all around the world.

We have a very wide range of engineering challenges to sink your teeth into. Freelancer.com has a modern frontend stack incorporating Angular, TypeScript, and RxJS. Our PHP and Python backend on AWS powers a large suite of services running a modern global marketplace; messaging, payments, translations, file services, and a notification system sending millions of notifications an hour.

This role is full-time in-office, based at our Sydney office in Grosvenor Place.

The Role

This is a highly influential role. As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll be one of our premier engineers in Sydney and will work alongside our CTO and the senior engineering team to drive technical direction, raise the bar for engineering practices, and build improvements to our architecture and processes. Other engineers will look to you as a source of technical guidance and mentorship.

This is also a highly technical role. You will be a hands-on engineer, designing, building, and maintaining our shared infrastructure. You’ll be breaking down technical debt by planning and working through major migrations or upgrades. You’ll be rolling out monitoring and alerting on a systemic level to up our reliability. And yeah, you’ll be catching and putting out fires in the event they do spring up.

What you will do

• Design and build high-quality software that scales globally and is a joy to operate.
• Lead architectural decisions for your team and adjacent projects, balancing correctness, simplicity, and speed.
• Navigate and plan incremental modernisations for our stack and codebase.
• Optimise, debug, and harden complex systems across the stack, from data models to deployment pipelines.
• Champion best practices - testing, code quality, observability, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Share knowledge, mentor engineers, and help close skill gaps across the team.
• Communicate risk, trade-offs, and progress clearly to stakeholders and push back when necessary.
• Contribute to interview loops and help us hire outstanding engineers.

You’d be a great fit if

• You have led delivery of large projects and can explain the “why” behind key technical trade-offs.
• You have driven technical direction without immediate managerial power.
• You have defined coding standards or best practices in your teams or organisations to raise the engineering bar.
• You have owned a service or major code area and handled significant incidents professionally.
• You are the kind of engineer that others bring their hardest problems to.

What you bring

Must haves

• Tertiary degree in Computer Science or related Engineering.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience in shipping and maintaining large-scale web systems.
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Python, PHP, or Node.js.
• Solid SQL and relational database skills, preferably MySQL, including sound data modelling.
• Cloud experience, preferably with AWS, and Linux proficiency.
• Strong troubleshooting and creative problem solving ability.

Nice to haves

• Service-oriented or microservice architecture and containerisation experience.
• Experience with modern TypeScript and a frontend framework such as Angular, React, or Vue 
• Strong knowledge of computer networking.
• Sound understanding of OWASP and web security best practices.

Benefits

• A meritocratic culture with the ability to take ownership and fast-track your career growth.
• Potential for major impact with direct access to senior leadership, all the way up to the top.
• Weekly Town Hall with global presentations and open Q&A sessions with our CEO.
• Harbour views at Grosvenor Place, Friday catered lunches and regular team-building events.

We’re solving one of humanity’s hardest problems: connecting talent to opportunity. Doing that at scale means building systems that are fast, fair, and fault-tolerant across every timezone. If you want your engineering skill to matter beyond the codebase, to genuinely shift what’s possible for millions - join us.