Job Description

What if your next gig made you a better engineer, not just a faster one?

You’ve shipped enough features to know the real headaches aren’t in your code. They’re in how your code behaves in the wild. Latency, cascading failures, 3 a.m. alerts (that nobody understands)… Sound familiar?

If you’re Java Software Engineer who cares about good system design. And you’re looking for a role that will give you an actual new challenge. Then this might be the change you’re looking for.

Whether you want to move into staff/principal engineering, architecture, or even leadership.

You'll leave this role with the systems-level skills that unlock doors and the kind of confidence and capability that can’t be learned in a bootcamp, a blog post, or by adding more features.

What’s in it for you?

• Keep writing code: You’ll still spend 50–70% of your time building tools, improving services, and writing software.
• But with more impact: Your code won’t just add features. It’ll make the entire system faster, more reliable, and easier to scale.
• Own your services end to end: Design, deploy, and observe. And yes, occasionally get paged. But you’ll understand what’s going wrong, and fix it properly. And only in work time.
• Upskill: Think observability, distributed systems, incident response, capacity planning. Skills that make you unfireable.

❌ “I don’t want to just be on-call support.”
✅ You won’t be. There’s a team that handles that.  Your goal is to build systems that don’t need constant support. That’s why we need software engineers in SRE. 

❌ “I love writing code — I don’t want to become ops.”
✅ Perfect. This is still an engineering role. You’ll write code to fix problems once, not manually fix them 100 times.

❌ “I’m not an expert in infra.”
✅ Even better. We’ll teach you. If you can write good Java and think in systems, you’ve got the hard part nailed.

So you want to find out more? Well, the CEO said it best:

"Reliability isn't a cost. And it's not a support role. It's an integral strategy for customer satisfaction & retention."

That mindset has real backing here, with a full Site Reliability Engineering team led by a former Google SRE.

This is your chance to learn from people who’ve built reliable systems at massive scale. No gatekeeping. No firefighting 24/7. There’s no on-call work. You’ll get space to explore, build, and grow, with mentorship baked into the team culture.

What’s the environment?

• Cloud-native tech: Over 1000 microservices across AWS and GCP, built with modern patterns (event-driven architecture, platform ops model).
• Healthy team size: Big enough for support, small enough for you to make a visible impact.
• Hybrid work model: 2 days a week in the office. Flexible hours. No clock-watchers.
• Direct access to leaders: You’ll get face time with the CTO, VP Eng, and key squads. And they actually want your input.

Have you got the right experience? 

We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for potential. If you’re a Senior Java Dev with system design skills, and care deeply about good engineering, this could be your launchpad into something new.

Want to find out more?

That’s easy. Just send an email to Julien@theonset.com.au. Apply to this ad. Or give me a call on 0406 158 832. 

Don’t worry if your CV isn’t up to date. We can worry about that later.