Staff Site Reliability Engineer - $300k (base + super + bonus), Sydney - 2 Days WFH

You join the team.

You learn the systems. You find the problems. You write the docs.

You give the talk, but nobody listens.

3am pages. Same alert. Different week.

You know the fix. It's just not prioritised.

You're a Staff SRE. You've got the answers. You've got the experience.

You're just not being asked to use them.

Most experienced SREs reach a point where keeping systems alive stops being the challenge.

What's exhausting is watching the same reliability problems repeat, because nobody prioritises the work that would prevent them.

As the foundational Staff SRE here, it would be different.

You're not here to own incidents. You're here to eliminate the reasons they happen.

The hiring manager's view is that reliability has no shortage of good ideas, they're just rarely prioritised.

This role exists to change that.

You'll have genuine influence over OKRs, engineering standards, and how reliability is measured across an organisation of 1,500 engineers.

That's not a common thing to be offered.

This is their first Staff SRE hire.

That means you'll define what the role means inside one of Australia's largest engineering organisations.

The impact you need to reach Principal is here.

You'll also shape their Agentic SRE strategy. AI applied to incident detection, diagnosis, and remediation. Not a pilot. In production.

For engineers who want to understand where the discipline is heading over the next decade, joining now means building that experience rather than reading about it in someone else's case study.

If you've been doing strong Staff-level work but feel like you're spending more time firefighting than fixing things, then send me a message. 

julien@theonset.com.au | 0406 158 832

Lead Engineer – Payments | Sydney & Melbourne

We're partnering with a leading engineering organisation to hire multiple Lead Engineers to help shape the future of its payments technology.

This is a rare opportunity to join a team at the forefront of payments innovation, building technology that will continue to scale and evolve over the coming years. You'll work on highly available, high-throughput payment systems while remaining hands-on with modern engineering and playing a key role in defining the future direction of the platform.

This isn't a role where you'll simply deliver tickets. You'll have a genuine voice in platform strategy, architecture and engineering standards, working alongside Principal Engineers to solve complex technical challenges and influence how the platform evolves.

We're looking for engineers who thrive on ownership, enjoy challenging the status quo, and want to help build the next generation of payments technology.

What you'll be doing

• Drive architecture and technical direction across a modern, cloud-native payments platform.

• Design and build highly scalable, resilient Java microservices running on Google Cloud.

• Lead complex engineering initiatives from concept through to production.

• Influence platform strategy, architectural decisions and engineering best practices.

• Mentor and develop engineers through technical leadership, design reviews and coaching.

• Champion innovation, reliability, performance, security and operational excellence across the platform.

What you'll bring

• Extensive hands-on experience with Java and Spring Boot, building modern distributed systems.

• Strong experience developing cloud-native applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Deep expertise in microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems and API design.

• Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale, high-throughput payments platforms, with a strong understanding of payment processing and financial transaction systems.

• Experience with NoSQL databases and building highly available, resilient platforms.

• A track record of leading complex engineering initiatives while remaining hands-on with software development.

• The confidence to influence technical direction, challenge ideas, contribute to architecture discussions and drive engineering excellence.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage and influence stakeholders across engineering and the wider business.

Please note: This is a specialist opportunity requiring recent hands-on payments engineering experience combined with hands-on engineering leadership. We're looking for engineers who want to influence platform strategy, drive innovation and make a genuine impact. Only candidates with recent payments engineering experience will be contacted.

Location: Permanent opportunities available in Sydney and Melbourne.

Senior Software Engineer – Java | Payments Platform

Sydney or Melbourne | Permanent

If you're the type of engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems, influencing technical direction, and building software that operates at genuine scale, this is worth a look.

We're partnering with one of Australia's leading technology organisations as they continue investing in a next-generation payments platform. With significant long-term investment already committed, you'll be joining a business at a pivotal stage as they modernise and scale a platform that will underpin millions of critical financial transactions for years to come.

This is more than another Java role. You'll have the opportunity to shape engineering standards, influence platform strategy, introduce new ideas, and work alongside experienced engineers who genuinely care about building quality software.

What you'll be doing

• Build and evolve a modern, cloud-native payments platform using Java and Spring Boot.

• Design highly scalable, resilient microservices capable of handling high-volume transaction processing.

• Influence architecture, platform strategy and engineering best practices.

• Drive improvements around performance, reliability, observability and operational excellence.

• Work closely with Product, Architecture and Engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges.

• Champion modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, automation and continuous improvement.

• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, technical discussions and knowledge sharing.

What we're looking for

• Strong commercial experience with Java and Spring Boot.

• Experience building microservices and event-driven distributed systems.

• Exposure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and modern cloud-native architectures.

• Experience designing and delivering APIs for large-scale production systems.

• Strong understanding of software reliability, resilience and security.

• Experience contributing to incident management and continuous platform improvement.

• Comfortable using AI engineering tools to improve development productivity.

• Excellent communication skills and the confidence to influence technical decisions.

• Experience within payments, cards, banking or other high-throughput transactional environments is highly regarded.

Why this opportunity?

• Help shape a strategic payments platform that will continue to evolve over the coming years.

• Influence technical direction rather than simply delivering tickets.

• Work on genuinely complex engineering challenges at enterprise scale.

• Join a collaborative, high-performing engineering culture that values ownership and innovation.

• Be surrounded by experienced engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems.

• Long-term career progression with opportunities to grow your technical influence as the platform expands.

If you're looking for an environment where your ideas will be heard, your technical expertise will have genuine impact, and you'll play a key role in shaping the future of a large-scale payments platform, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply now or reach out for a confidential discussion.

Principal Engineer – Java | Payments

Sydney | Permanent

Shape the Future of Payments Engineering

A leading financial services provider is investing in the next generation of its real-time payments platform and is looking for a Principal Engineer to help define what's next.

This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern software engineering, building highly scalable, cloud-native payment systems that process mission-critical financial transactions. You'll have the autonomy to shape technical strategy, influence architecture across multiple engineering teams and drive the adoption of emerging technologies—all while remaining hands-on and close to the code.

We're looking for an engineer who is passionate about solving complex technical challenges, enjoys driving innovation and is excited by how AI is transforming the software development lifecycle.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and build highly scalable Java services powering modern payment platforms.

• Drive architecture across distributed, event-driven microservices handling high-volume, low-latency transaction processing.

• Develop resilient payment orchestration capabilities supporting multiple payment rails and transaction flows.

• Shape technical roadmaps and influence engineering strategy across multiple teams.

• Lead complex engineering initiatives from concept through to production.

• Remain hands-on, contributing code while mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards.

• Champion AI-assisted software development, leveraging modern tooling to improve developer productivity and software quality.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to improve platform capability, scalability and customer outcomes.

• Ensure systems are secure, resilient and designed to meet the demands of large-scale financial services.

About You

You'll likely be operating as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Technical Architect or Senior Technical Lead with a passion for building large-scale distributed systems.

You'll bring:

• Expert Java and Spring Boot experience.

• Strong cloud engineering capability across AWS and/or GCP.

• Deep expertise in microservices, distributed systems, event-driven architecture and modern integration patterns.

• Experience building payment platforms, payment orchestration services or other high-throughput financial systems.

• A strong understanding of payment ecosystems, including card payments, issuer/acquirer integrations, Open Banking or real-time payment processing.

• Knowledge of secure software engineering practices for financial systems and mission-critical transaction processing.

• Proven experience driving architecture, influencing technical strategy and mentoring engineering teams while remaining hands-on.

• Practical experience embedding AI into the SDLC using modern engineering tools such as Claude Code, Roo Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.

Why Join?

This is more than a Principal Engineer role—it's an opportunity to shape the future of engineering within one of Australia's leading financial services organisations.

You'll work alongside high-calibre engineers solving complex distributed systems challenges, influence the technical roadmap of a business-critical payments platform and help define how emerging technologies and AI are embedded into modern software development.

If you're looking for a role where you can combine architectural leadership, hands-on engineering and genuine innovation, we'd love to hear from you.

Done building the same CRUD apps over and over?

Senior Java Engineer – Java, Cloud & AI Transformation

This is an opportunity for a Senior Java Engineer to play a key role in a major application transformation, helping modernise and replatform a suite of established cloud-based software onto a modern architecture.

It’s a hands-on engineering role, but the opportunity goes well beyond delivery. You’ll have the scope to influence architecture, lead technical initiatives and shape how AI is adopted across the engineering team.

The opportunity

You’ll work with a strong engineering team across Java, Spring Boot, microservices and cloud, helping define and deliver the next generation of their applications.

You’ll:

• Lead features, technical initiatives and proof-of-concepts

• Influence architecture and design decisions across the transformation

• Help replatform existing applications onto a modern cloud-native stack

• Drive improvements across resilience, observability and operational excellence

• Remain hands-on while mentoring engineers and raising technical standards

Lead the AI engineering journey

A major focus of this role is helping the team move from simply using AI tools to engineering effectively with AI.

The team is already adopting AI-assisted development, but they want a Senior Engineer who can bring ideas, challenge existing approaches and establish best practices for AI-enabled software engineering.

This could include spec-driven development, agentic workflows, automated evaluations, testing, security and using AI to accelerate application modernisation.

You don't need to be an AI/ML Engineer. You need to be a strong software engineer who is genuinely interested in how AI is changing the way engineering teams build software and wants the opportunity to lead that change.

What we're looking for

• Deep Java and Spring Boot expertise

• Strong microservices and REST API design experience

• Architecture and system design capability

• Cloud experience across GCP, AWS or multi-cloud environments

• Strong understanding of resilience and observability

• Experience leading features, POCs or technical initiatives

• Strong automated testing and CI/CD practices

• Ability to mentor engineers and influence engineering standards

• Genuine experience or interest in AI-assisted engineering

This would suit a Senior Engineer who wants to stay close to the code while having genuine influence over a modernisation program, engineering standards and the team's AI strategy.

Staff / Principal Backend Engineer – Payments Infrastructure

Sydney | Early-stage | Greenfield | Java / JVM | Payments & Billing

This is an opportunity to join a well-backed software company at the point where the core engineering foundations are still being built.

The business is building payments and billing infrastructure for software companies. The problem goes well beyond processing a payment. It covers how SaaS businesses price products, manage billing, process transactions, expose APIs and eventually automate much of the operational work that currently sits around revenue.

Very little has been decided for you.

You’ll join a small founding engineering team and have a major say in how the platform is designed, how the systems fit together and what the engineering standards look like as the company grows.

What you’ll be building

The backend will sit at the centre of a complex payments and billing platform.

You could be working across areas such as:

• payment and billing infrastructure

• pricing and subscription logic

• APIs and integrations

• transaction and event processing

• distributed systems and service architecture

• reliability, performance and observability

• data flows across payments, customers and products

• systems that can support increasingly automated billing and pricing decisions

This is genuine greenfield engineering. You won’t be inheriting years of legacy architecture or joining to maintain somebody else’s decisions.

You’ll help make those decisions.

The role

This is a senior individual contributor position for someone comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy.

There won’t be a detailed technical roadmap handed to you with every decision already made. You’ll work closely with the founders and other senior engineers to understand the problem, work through the trade-offs and decide how things should be built.

That means getting involved in questions such as:

• Where should service boundaries sit?

• What belongs in the core domain model?

• How should APIs be designed for customers building on top of the platform?

• What needs to be synchronous versus event-driven?

• How do we design for correctness when money is involved?

• Where do we need strong consistency and where can we accept eventual consistency?

• How do we build something simple today without creating problems at scale later?

You’ll still write plenty of code, but the value of this role is not measured by ticket throughput.

The expectation is that you can take an unclear engineering problem, work out what matters, make sound technical decisions and get it into production without needing somebody to constantly point you in the right direction.

What we're looking for

You’re likely already operating at Staff, Principal, Lead or senior Founding Engineer level, even if your current title says something different.

We’re particularly interested in engineers who have:

• designed and built complex backend systems

• made architecture decisions that affected more than one service or team

• strong Java and JVM experience

• worked with distributed systems, APIs and modern cloud infrastructure

• built systems where reliability and correctness genuinely mattered

• operated well when requirements were incomplete or changing

• taken ownership from problem definition through to production

• influenced technical direction without needing formal management authority

Experience building payments, billing, financial infrastructure, ledgers, transaction systems or similarly complex platforms would be particularly relevant.

People from strong SaaS, fintech, infrastructure or platform engineering backgrounds could also fit well if they have dealt with comparable systems problems.

Why consider it?

The main reason is the stage of the company.

You’re early enough that your decisions will genuinely shape what gets built.

The architecture isn’t settled. The engineering culture isn’t inherited. There isn’t a large organisation between you and the problem.

You’ll be working directly with experienced founders and a small group of senior engineers on a product where the backend is the product.

For someone who has spent the last few years operating inside established systems and wants to build something from the foundations again, this is a rare opportunity to do it with real scope and responsibility.

It will suit someone who wants ownership rather than oversight, and who is comfortable making decisions when there isn’t an existing playbook to follow.

If you’ve built important backend systems before and want your next role to put you much closer to the architecture, product and company decisions, I’d be interested in speaking.

Lead Firmware Engineer

Sydney | $150,000-$170,000 + super

We’re working with an established Australian engineering business that designs high-end products for creative industries doing big things for the arts.

Its products combine embedded control, colour science, networking and rugged electronics. They’re designed in Sydney, manufactured at scale and used by professional crews across international markets.

The team is now hiring a Lead Firmware Engineer to take ownership of the architecture behind its next generation of products.

The role

You’ll become the central technical owner of an established embedded software platform.

There is a mature codebase and an experienced multidisciplinary team around you. Your job is to give the firmware clear architectural direction while remaining close enough to the code and hardware to deliver.

You’ll:

• Own the firmware architecture and technical roadmap across a family of connected products

• Develop embedded software in C/C++ on STM32 microcontrollers using FreeRTOS

• Make sound decisions around task structure, inter-task communication, semaphores, mutexes and system behaviour

• Build and maintain bootloaders, firmware update mechanisms and networked device functionality

• Work across Ethernet, TCP/IP, LWIP, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB and wired control protocols

• Develop embedded web interfaces and on-device control experiences

• Work with colour-control algorithms, high-resolution dimming, special effects and camera synchronisation

• Debug the boundary between firmware and electronics using UART, I2C, SPI, logic analysers and oscilloscopes

• Read schematics, understand PCB designs and work closely with electronics and mechanical engineers

• Improve the structure, reliability and maintainability of an established embedded platform

• Help shape future work in remote device management, fleet visibility and connected asset tracking

This is a hands-on senior engineering role with genuine architectural authority and a pathway towards technical leadership.

What you’ll bring

Firmware is your core craft. You understand electronics, but your depth sits in building and owning embedded software systems.

You’ll likely have:

• Eight or more years of embedded software or firmware engineering experience

• Strong commercial C/C++ development experience

• Deep experience with STM32 or comparable 32-bit ARM microcontrollers

• Production experience with FreeRTOS or another real-time operating system

• A strong understanding of embedded networking and communications

• Practical bootloader and firmware update experience

• Evidence of owning substantial systems or codebases, rather than isolated components

• The ability to explain architectural decisions clearly and test your thinking with other engineers

• Enough hardware fluency to investigate problems across the firmware-electronics boundary

Experience with embedded GUIs, web servers, AWS or Azure IoT, Python, C#, cellular connectivity, GPS or mobile applications would be useful. None of those outweighs strong firmware judgement.

How you’ll work

This is a small, practical engineering environment. People are expected to understand the wider product, ask why something is being built and spot the next problem without waiting for a detailed instruction.

You’ll suit the team if you’re:

• Curious about the complete system, not only your assigned component

• Comfortable taking ownership in an environment with fewer layers and less ceremony

• Decisive without becoming dogmatic

• Happy to challenge an approach, explain your reasoning and listen when someone has a better one

• Motivated by building a physical product whose performance is visible in the final result

The role is based primarily onsite in Sydney, where the products, electronics and test equipment live. There is sensible flexibility to work from home when focused work calls for it, along with onsite parking.

The interview process

The technical assessment reflects the actual work. There are no algorithm puzzles or performative coding exercises.

Expect practical conversations covering:

• FreeRTOS task communication and code structure

• System architecture through a whiteboard design exercise

• Hardware interfaces, schematics and firmware-electronics troubleshooting

The team wants to understand how you think, what you’ve genuinely owned and how you’ll work alongside the engineers already there.

Interested?

Apply through this advertisement or contact Toby Tank at The Onset for a confidential conversation.

We’ll share the company’s identity and full product context directly with suitably aligned candidates. All applications and enquiries will be managed exclusively through The Onset.

Marketing that actually gets close to the business.

We’re The Onset - a specialist recruitment business deeply connected to Australia’s technology ecosystem. We work with ambitious companies, brilliant industry experts and a wider group of specialists across data, AI, design and transformation through The Omnia Collective.

We’re growing our marketing team and looking for someone who wants more than a narrow coordinator role. You’ll help us build smarter campaigns, experiment with AI and automation, support client engagement, work across the wider Omnia group and get involved in the events and experiences that bring our community together.

It’s a broad role by design. One day you might be building a target-account campaign with a recruitment leader; the next, testing an AI workflow, helping activate an industry event or pulling together the data that tells us what is actually working.

What you’ll get stuck into

• Build targeted B2B campaigns around the clients, sectors and communities we want to engage.

• Experiment with AI and automation to make research, campaign delivery, follow-up and reporting smarter.

• Work closely with our recruiters on client outreach, useful market content, case studies and sales enablement.

• Coordinate website, SEO/AEO/GEO, email and digital activity and help us turn performance data into better decisions.

• Become a key link between The Onset and Omnia Collective, working alongside teams across AI, data, design and transformation.

• Help deliver client, community and industry events - from the campaign and guest experience through to the practical set-up and follow-up.

• Keep the marketing engine organised: systems, assets, reporting, campaign workflows and the details that make good ideas happen.

You’ll thrive here if…

• You have marketing experience under your belt in B2B, growth, campaigns or marketing operations - and you’re ready for more ownership. Technology sector, recruitment or professional-services experience is useful, not essential.

• You are already using AI as a marketing and productivity tool. Maybe you use ChatGPT or Claude every day, have built agents and automations, or are the person who always asks, “could we make this easier?”

• You like working close to sales and clients and can see the difference between useful engagement and marketing noise.

• You are organised enough to keep multiple things moving, but curious enough to keep improving how they are done.

• You are comfortable with digital tools and data, without needing to be a technical specialist.

• You have a hands-on style. We are a small team: no one is too senior to help set up a room, move a box, capture content or solve the thing that needs solving.

• You enjoy people. This role crosses recruiters, leaders, clients, community members and teams across the wider Omnia group.

Why this one is interesting

• You’ll work alongside our Brand & Community Specialist, with room to build complementary expertise in growth, AI and marketing operations.

• You’ll have access to experts across Onset and The Omnia Collective and exposure to the way AI, data, design and transformation are changing businesses.

• You’ll work directly with senior leaders and recruitment consultants rather than sitting several layers away from the commercial conversation.

• You’ll get genuine variety: campaigns, AI, events, content, systems, client engagement and community.

• There is a clear path to grow as your ownership and capability expand.

• We offer a flexible WFH day, ongoing development, team events and a lively Surry Hills office environment.

A note on experience

We care more about capability, curiosity and attitude than finding someone who has done this exact job before. If you have a strong marketing foundation, like learning new technology and want to be close to the action in a growing business, we would like to hear from you.

Sponsorship is not available for this role and Australian based, B2B experience is preferred.

Interested?

Send us your CV and tell us a little about what caught your attention. If you have built something interesting with AI, run a campaign you are proud of or found a smarter way to solve a marketing problem, we would love to hear about that too.

Apply here or reach out to alyse@theonset.com.au!