Full job description

About us

• We're building a new category of interactive entertainment powered by AI characters, image, video, and real-time experiences. We’re one of the most-visited AI products globally, serving millions of users every day.
• We work in-person in Sydney, Australia, and hire globally.

How we work

• User-first: We build what people want. We invest time to understand our users and focus on adding value instead of extracting value.
• High agency, high ownership: We own outcomes end-to-end. When something goes wrong, we take responsibility and fix it.
• Urgency: We prioritize ruthlessly, increase leverage, and move at an exceptional pace.

What you'll do

You’ll join a small, talent-dense engineering team with significant ownership across product, infrastructure, and AI.

You won’t be handed narrowly-scoped tickets. You’ll work from problems and outcomes: understand what users need, decide what should be built, design the system, ship it, measure the result, and iterate.

Example projects

• Design memory for month-long conversations. Decide how memories are written, ranked, and retrieved across billions of messages while fitting everything into a fixed context budget.
• Build the For You feed. Own retrieval, ranking, cold start, and experimentation end-to-end, with retention as the metric.
• Ship frontier models days after release. Evaluate and benchmark new models, figure out the economics of hosting them at scale, and find the best configuration for millions of users.

What you'll bring

• A track record of shipping exceptional products at meaningful scale.
• Strong product and engineering judgment: knowing what to build, how to build it, and where to make tradeoffs.
• Hunger to win. You want high ownership, high expectations, and a lot of responsibility.

Our product stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, React, tRPC, Postgres, ClickHouse, Temporal, and AWS. Our inference stack is Python, serving LLMs, TTS, and diffusion image and video models on self-hosted GPUs.

What we offer

• Top-of-market compensation with meaningful equity upside.
• Real ownership from day one. Work on important problems and see the impact of what you ship.
• Fast-growing scope. As your impact grows, your responsibility and compensation should grow with it.
• A company card for food, coffee, tools, and anything that helps you do your best work.
• Daily team lunch and dinner at the office.
• An unlimited workspace budget to build your ideal setup.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for people moving to Sydney.

How we think about comp

We raise the ceiling for exceptional performers, not the floor. As your impact grows, your compensation should too.

• The listed range is cash + equity, with superannuation on top.
• We review compensation every 6 months.
• Bonuses reward past impact, and raises reflect your new level.

Our interview process

• Intro call: 15 minutes to align on the role and company.
• Founder interview: go deep on what you’ve built, how you think, and how you work.
• Technical interview: 1 hour of system design and technical discussion. No live coding.
• Paid work trial: spend 3 days with us in Sydney working on a real problem. We cover travel and accommodation, if needed.
• Offer: if it’s a strong fit, we move quickly.

Compensation Range: A$300K - A$800KFull job description

Company Description

• Hybrid working (3 days from home)
• Located next to Southern Cross Station
• 12-month maximum term contract

At Open Universities Australia (OUA), we believe everyone should have access to quality education, no matter their background or stage of life.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped over 400,000 students take their next step, often during some of the most important moments of their lives. Whether someone is changing careers, returning to study or pursuing a lifelong goal, the work we do helps open new possibilities every day. That’s what makes working at OUA meaningful. Every experience we create, every conversation we have and every decision we make can have a real impact on someone’s future.

When we do our best work, we help change lives.

In this role, you'll immerse yourself in cross-functional product teams, working collaboratively to enhance the experiences of both our students and university partners. Plus, you'll have the opportunity to broaden your skill set by diving into diverse tools and technologies, including TypeScript, React, Node.js and AWS.

The role of a software engineer is changing, and we’re changing with it. AI assisted tools are becoming increasingly central to the development process. This means more time spend planning and reviewing code, and less time handcrafting it. We are constantly looking for ways to leverage these tools to deliver more value while also improving the quality and reliability of the software that we are building.

If you’re excited by this and want to work somewhere that will give you the freedom to experiment, grow and make a real impact, we want to hear from you.

Check out our Engineering blog for more insights about our journey and progress to date.

Here's a glimpse into your day-to-day:

• Collaborating closely with our product development team to understand requirements and plan development tasks
• Working with AI coding agents as a normal part of how you build - we expect every engineer to own the code they ship, regardless of whether they handcrafted it or handed it off to an agent
• Reviewing code closely
• Designing, developing, testing, and deploying web-based systems using a mix of TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Node.js, and React
• Applying modern web architecture patterns and conventions such as microservices, API design, contract testing, containerisation, test automation, and serverless architecture
• Utilising modern software development techniques like test-driven development, deployment automation, and CI/CD
• Supporting production systems and maintaining existing products – As a member of the team, you’ll have joint ownership of the support and maintenance of production systems.
• Sharing knowledge and continuously honing your technical skills.

If you're ready to make an impact, here's what we're looking for:

• Experience using AI coding tools on production work, and a point of view on where they earn their keep and where they don't
• Solid planning skills - You can think through a problem, break it down and develop a plan
• Strong code reviewing skills - you can tell the difference between code that works and code that's right
• Familiarity with our software stack
• Familiarity with web architecture patterns and conventions, including microservices, API design, contract testing, containerization, test automation, and serverless architecture
• Knowledge of modern software development techniques, such as test-driven development, refactoring, deployment automation, DevOps, and CI/CD Experience with cloud computing services, particularly AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, S3, DynamoDB)

Why you’ll love working at OUA

OUA is a not-for-profit organisation with a strong people-first mindset. We do meaningful work that helps change lives through education, while creating an environment where our people feel supported, valued and empowered to grow.

When you join OUA, you become part of a warm, inclusive and curious culture where your ideas matter, your wellbeing is prioritised and your development is encouraged.

• Flexibility and ways of working