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.

We are working with an Australian AgTech business looking for a key sales hire.

They have built a SaaS platform that helps agricultural businesses manage important operational and risk-based processes across their sites.

The business has early customer traction and is now ready to put more focus around sales.

This person will work closely with the CEO to take ownership of current opportunities, build new pipeline and create a sales process that can grow with the business.

The role will involve:

• Managing deals from first conversation through to close
• Running demos and building relationships with customers
• Developing pipeline through outreach, partnerships and industry events
• Building structure around CRM, forecasting and follow-up
• Helping the team understand which customers and channels to focus on

AgTech experience would be useful, but it isn’t essential. We interested in people who have sold SaaS or technology into industrial, construction, logistics, manufacturing or other traditional industries.

Interested to learn more? Message Megan - megan@theonset.com.au

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.

Senior AI Engineer | AI Transformation, Automation & Governance

We're working with an established Australian technology company that is serious about becoming genuinely AI-native, rethinking how the organisation operates, how decisions are made and where AI can create meaningful commercial leverage.

They're looking for a Senior AI Engineer who sits at the intersection of engineering, business operations and AI strategy. You'll work directly with senior leadership and teams across the business to find the friction, challenge how things are done, and build the systems and automations that make the company smarter and faster.

Find the problems worth solving

• Work across the business to uncover inefficient workflows, manual processes and information gaps.

• Challenge and redesign processes before automating them.

• Prioritise opportunities based on ROI, risk and genuine commercial impact.

Build & automate

• Build production-grade internal AI systems using LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, APIs and automation.

• Connect fragmented systems and information to create trusted knowledge, insights and better decision-making.

• Take ideas from discovery through prototype, production and measurable adoption.

Own AI governance

• Establish the guardrails for how AI is safely and responsibly used across the organisation.

• Build AI-enabled approaches to security, compliance and governance, including ISO, SOC 2 and HIPAA.

• Own evaluation, auditability, privacy and appropriate human oversight of AI systems.

Influence the business

• Work directly with the CTO, Chief of Staff and executive team to shape the company's AI roadmap.

• Consult, communicate and influence across technical and non-technical teams.

• Lift AI capability across the business and help teams understand where AI adds value — and where it doesn't.

What we're looking for

You need to be technically excellent — but technical capability alone won't get you this job.

• Strong software/full-stack engineering foundations with experience building real AI systems in production.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, agentic systems, integrations, evaluation and automation.

• Strong consulting and stakeholder discovery skills — you can uncover the real problem rather than simply build what someone asks for.

• Genuine commercial acumen. You think about ROI, operating leverage, risk and business outcomes.

• Strong understanding of AI governance, security, privacy and responsible deployment.

• High autonomy and ownership — comfortable working from ambiguity rather than waiting for a perfect specification.

Experience in healthcare, regulated SaaS, consulting, solutions engineering or business transformation would be highly regarded.

Why this role?

This is a rare opportunity to combine AI engineering, internal consulting, business transformation and governance.

You'll have access to senior leadership, autonomy to identify the problems worth solving and the mandate to help shape how an entire organisation adopts AI.

Success won't be measured by how many agents you build.

It'll be measured by hours saved, errors removed, decisions accelerated and commercial value created.

Full-time | Australia | Remote-first

Global Paid Media and Growth Lead

• Set, own and deliver the paid growth strategy
• Lead a multi-million dollar paid media function
• Circa $190k - $210k plus super and bonus

Join a global, high-growth digital platform operating at the forefront of the creative, content and AI ecosystem.

This is a pivotal role leading a multi-million dollar global paid media function, with a clear mandate to scale customer acquisition through sophisticated, full-funnel campaigns across social and non-search channels.

You’ll have end-to-end ownership of paid growth strategy and execution, working closely with in-house creative and analytics teams to build a high-velocity experimentation engine that drives measurable performance.

With direct access to senior leadership and the CEO, this role offers both influence and accountability in shaping the future of the growth function.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own and execute the global paid media strategy across social and non-search channels

• Manage and optimise significant media budgets to drive strong ROAS and acquisition efficiency

• Build and scale a creative experimentation framework to continuously improve performance

• Leverage AI, automation and advanced tooling to enhance campaign optimisation and testing velocity

• Partner with analytics to define attribution models, measurement frameworks and experiment design

• Identify and unlock new growth opportunities across emerging platforms and channels

• Collaborate cross-functionally with creative, product marketing and growth teams

• Lead and mentor a small team

What You Bring

• Expertise in paid media with proven success managing large-scale acquisition campaigns across multiple geographies

• Deep expertise across platforms including Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and programmatic display

• Strong track record building and scaling experimentation frameworks

• Experience leveraging AI and automation to improve campaign performance

• Advanced analytical capability with a commercial, results-driven mindset

• Leadership experience within high-performance marketing environments

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills

Why This Role Stands Out

• Fully remote (across Australia or New Zealand)

• Ownership of a global, multi-million dollar paid media function

• Direct exposure to executive leadership and CEO

• Strong in-house creative and analytics capability (you won’t be flying blind)

• Real focus on experimentation, innovation and AI-driven growth

• Opportunity to shape the future of a high-impact acquisition channel

If you’re looking for a role where you can operate at scale, influence strategy and push the boundaries of paid growth, this is a standout opportunity.  Apply online or call Michelle Rubinstein at The Onset - 0413 463 043.

Some data scientists want the cleanest possible dataset. Some want to spend months perfecting a model.

And then there are those who want to see something they discovered on Monday become a product experiment by Friday.

A stealth payments startup is building the monetisation platform for modern software companies.

The goal is to make it faster and easier for software businesses to change pricing, launch new business models, expand internationally, improve payment performance and create better buying and upgrade experiences.

The founders spent the better part of a decade building monetisation systems inside a global software firm. They saw what becomes possible when infrastructure, product thinking and commercial data work together. They also saw how difficult it is for most companies to recreate that capability themselves.

Now they’re turning that experience into a product.

This isn’t another payment processor. It’s a platform that sits across billing and payments, helping software companies support subscriptions, usage, credits, seats, tiers and hybrid models without stitching together fragmented systems or building everything in-house.

A central part of the vision is an intelligence layer that can tell customers what they should do next.

That might mean localising a price in a particular market, changing how a payment is routed, identifying a cohort ready for a packaging change or recommending an experiment to improve conversion or retention.

They’re hiring their first Product Data Scientist to help build it.

Operating as a product builder: finding the right question, working through imperfect evidence and turning the answer into something customers can understand and use.

You won’t be sitting downstream, building dashboards and answering questions after decisions have already been made.

You’ll report to the CTO and work directly with the founding team, product, design, engineering and early design partners.

You’ll help decide which problems the company should solve, what information the product needs and how raw monetisation data becomes a recommendation a customer can understand and act on.

You’ll shape the question, define the data, analyse the opportunity, develop a recommendation, design the experiment and help turn the answer into a product experience.

Day one won’t come with a giant proprietary dataset or a mature data function.

You’ll need to work out how to deliver useful intelligence to early customers using individual merchant data, external benchmarks, market signals, thoughtful rules and tested assumptions.

You’ll also build the foundations underneath it. That includes creating reliable visibility into merchant usage, health and adoption, and structuring billing and payment data so it can flow into the intelligence layer.

As the customer base grows, you’ll help evolve that intelligence from rules and heuristics into more adaptive recommendations. Eventually, these systems will be able to recommend, test or act on a customer’s behalf.

That ambiguity is part of the job.

You might investigate why paid retention is under performing in a new market, whether a local payment method would improve conversion, which customers should see a different package, or how payment routing should respond to performance, cost, geography and payment-method signals.

The goal isn’t technical sophistication for its own sake. It is giving software businesses credible evidence they can use to make better commercial decisions.

You’ll care about statistical rigour because customers will make real decisions based on your work. You’ll care about data quality because weak evidence creates weak recommendations. And you’ll care about product design because even the best analysis is useless if nobody understands or trusts it.

You’ll be:

• Owning monetisation and product analysis from the initial question through to a shipped recommendation
• Building the data foundations behind both internal decision-making and the customer-facing intelligence layer
• Identifying opportunities across pricing, packaging, payments, conversion and retention
• Building early product intelligence using merchant data, rules, heuristics and external benchmarks
• Developing the data strategy and roadmap from rules-based intelligence toward adaptive and agentic systems
• Setting the standard for how an early-stage company uses data to make product and commercial decisions

During the first 6-12 months, success will mean:

• Giving the team reliable, self-serve visibility into merchant usage, health and adoption
• Helping merchants bring their billing and payment data into the platform in a structured and reliable way
• Taking at least three pricing, packaging or payment opportunities through to a real experiment or customer change, each with a measurable before-and-after result
• Delivering the agreed data strategy and roadmap for the intelligence layer

Ideal experience:

• Senior, hands-on experience in product data science, growth data science or applied data science
• Strong statistical foundations, including experimentation, hypothesis testing and working with imperfect evidence
• Experience using behavioural and commercial data to influence a product roadmap
• Payment’s experience is strongly preferred. Product-led growth or B2C software experience is the strongest alternative

The important thing is that you enjoy building data products as much as analysing them.

This is a founding-stage team with real design partners, direct customer exposure and a lot of consequential work still sitting in blank space. Early hires won’t inherit a finished operating manual. They’ll help shape the product, culture and way the company works.

The team is based in Surry Hills and aims to spend around three days together in the office each week.

Interview process will include a technical assessment and a case study.

The package range is $150k-$190k base + super + ESOP.

Apply through the link or contact ronny@theonset.com.au.

https://onsetgroup.qwilr.com/Candidate-Briefing-EatClub-Director-of-Engineering-3iugS2nkQHuf

Director of Engineering

In the role of Director of Engineering, you will guide a department of managers and individual contributors, working in tandem with Design, Product, and Technology leaders to execute major initiatives. You will collaborate with the CPTO on high-level strategy and planning, while remaining available to support the team during critical issues. While this is not a coding role, you are responsible for reviewing design documentation to ensure technical solutions are both viable and aligned with business goals. You will prioritize the identification and resolution of bottlenecks to boost team productivity and mentor emerging leaders by balancing guidance with professional autonomy. Your decision-making will be driven by customer needs and commercial impact, championing solutions that are as practical as they are innovative. Additionally, you will be a key advocate for the company's technical brand, dedicated to attracting and hiring top-tier engineering talent.

Responsibilities:

On any given week, you will be:

• Building a world-class engineering culture by coaching a group of talented engineers and emerging leaders
• Partnering closely with Design, Product, and Tech leadership to define and execute their high-impact roadmap
• Unblocking the team through technical ambiguity and steering their architecture toward commercial success
• Leading the charge on AI adoption, ensuring agentic development is woven into the team's daily workflow
• Acting as a key advocate for their technical brand to attract and hire top-tier engineering talent
• Championing the customer and driving commercial impact at every stage of the technical decision-making process

Projects you'll be working on at EatClub...
​
​Sample initiatives you may lead:

• Refining SDLC workflows, including sprint structures, ceremonies, and review processes
• Evolving the engineering culture and operations to integrate modern AI capabilities
• Managing cross-functional projects focused on organizational risk and compliance
• Directing employee engagement through survey analysis and resulting strategic actions
  
  

  Qualifications:

  You have...

  • At least 5 years of experience in engineering management
  • At least 1 year managing managers
  • A strong sense of ownership, especially leading teams through uncertainty
  • Strong commercial sense and a habit of keeping the customer in mind
  • A track record of recruiting A-players both as ICs and managers

  It would be extra awesome if you also had...

  • Hands-on experience with agentic AI development
  • Familiarity with two-sided market products
  • Experience in writing products for the hospitality industry

  You are...

  • You are leader of people and a builder of teams
  • You are curious about what makes engineering teams great. You know the literature, but you have original ideas
  • You are hungry. You want to grow and you are looking for a great place to support your growth
  • You are excited to lead people through the great changes AI brings to our industry
  • You are a business leader. You understand where your team fits in the big picture
  • You are courageous enough to talk truth to power. You handle wins and losses with calm and confidence
  • You don't need every question answered for you. You can navigate uncertainty well while supporting others

  Maybe this role is not for you if....

  • You don't have a strong growth mindset and a genuine hunger to succeed
  • You prefer stability and clarity, clear playbooks, and unchanging priorities over a fast-moving environment
  • You expect detailed instructions on how to manage, lead, or prioritise your teams or your work
  • You think role and title set you apart, and hate your ideas challenged by people under you