Purpose Bureau is a high-growth ESG data and technology business helping organisations understand, measure and manage sustainability-related risks and performance across their supply chains. We track activities and insights for millions of legal entities globally, combining our proprietary data with real expertise to support clients with high-quality intelligence in a rapidly evolving space.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a growing business at a pivotal moment, as we turn a reliable ESG data platform into an interactive product for real-time consumption by our global clients.

Position Summary

The Senior Backend Engineer (Python/ AWS) is a core engineering role at Purpose Bureau, building the product back-end that powers our interactive ESG product. You will own the design and implementation of the frameworks that serve entity data on demand, the serving tier that exposes it to the front-end, and the AWS infrastructure it all runs on, with the support of our Data Architect whenever you want it.

This is a senior role that leads first and foremost through output and results: the systems you design and ship shape the technical direction, and you have the autonomy to make the calls. It suits an experienced engineer who wants real ownership of a platform at a genuinely interesting point of scale.

Key responsibilities

- Reporting to Chief Data Officer (CDO)
- Design and build the serving tier: the API and serving layer that exposes our data to the front-end, with clean, versioned data contracts and tenant isolation enforced as a hard invariant.
- Build the on-demand processing pipeline: async, request-driven queue-and-worker flows that take a client request and return a structured result in minutes, not hours, with idempotency, correlation and bounded latency.




- Own the operational serving data store that backs the product, consuming our Redshift outputs to feed it.
- Own the AWS infrastructure your services run on (infrastructure-as-code, compute, networking, observability and CI/CD), operate what you ship in production as the first point of escalation for your own services, and drive the cost and performance work that comes with scale.
- Work within our agent-oriented codebase, where agentic tools such as Claude Code are the standard way of working. You will share responsibility with the Data Architect for upholding and evolving the strong engineering standards and principles that govern it.
- Partner with the Data Architect and the front-end engineers so the back end and front-end meet cleanly, choosing the right tools for the recent serving layer.

About you

You are a senior engineer who likes owning the whole implementation rather than a corner of it. You build the machinery other people rely on, you reach for abstraction last rather than first, and you have taken systems through production and iteration, not just the green-field build.

- At least five years of backend engineering with deep Python: you design and ship frameworks and libraries (async, typed, packaged and performance-aware) and have carried production applications through build, release and iteration, not just scripting.




- Solid AWS and infrastructure-as-code experience across the kind of stack we run (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, S3, Redshift), with the judgement to scale without gold-plating.
- Experience designing and operating async, on-demand systems (queues, workers, idempotency, correlation and bounded-latency job-to-result flows), with the backend and API expertise to expose them, including using a transactional relational database as a serving tier, not just a store.
- Working SQL, enough to consume our Redshift outputs and own the operational serving store; authoring the warehouse model sits with the Data Architect.
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience that shows you know your stuff.

Highly regarded

- Fluency with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, and comfort working in and improving an agent-oriented codebase.
- Broad familiarity with LLMs and document extraction, orchestrating and serving these rather than building the pipelines.
- Prior work with ESG, entity or registry data.
- Complementary SQL or data tooling.

You will own the engine room of a platform that turns messy data into trustworthy ESG intelligence, with the autonomy to design it and the support of senior people when you want them. You will work on genuinely hard scale problems, from hundreds of millions of entities to a warehouse becoming an interactive product, and your work will directly shape how companies understand their environmental and social footprint and make better decisions for the planet. We offer a competitive salary, real investment in your development, and flexible, hybrid working from our Sydney CBD office.

Compensation and Incentives

- Base Salary: $160k - $180k + super (based on experience)

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📌 Senior Backend Engineer (Python/ AWS) (City of Sydney)
🏢 Purpose Bureau
📍 City of Sydney