Senior enough to make the call. Hands-on enough to build it.

Our client is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to become a genuine second-in-command within a growing product engineering team. This is not a Senior title attached to a longer list of tickets.

The Engineering Team Lead divides their time across coding, planning, people leadership and stakeholders. That means there are large parts of the day when this person will be the most senior engineer actively working in the codebase.

When something needs a technical decision, the team should not have to wait.

When a feature becomes complicated, you should be able to help shape the approach.

When a pull request needs thoughtful review, a risk appears or another engineer gets stuck, you will be one of the people they turn to.

And yes, you will still spend plenty of time actually writing code.

About the business

Our client is a high-growth Australian education company building the technology platform behind a rapidly scaling student learning business. Since 2020, the organisation has supported more than 10,000 students and grown to more than 300 team members. It has appeared on the AFR Fast 100 for four consecutive years, ranking #8 in 2025.

The business operates across multiple education brands and is investing increasingly in technology as it grows.

The engineering team works across learning platforms, content systems, enrolment integrations, secure resource delivery and the services that connect the student experience together.

The ambition is bigger than digitising tutoring.

They are building scalable education infrastructure designed to support significantly more students over time.

The opportunity

This role sits directly underneath the Software Engineering Team Leader and is effectively the second-in-command within the engineering team. You will lead meaningful pieces of work from scoping through to production, make implementation decisions independently, review other engineers’ work and help keep delivery moving when the Team Lead is unavailable.

You will be expected to bring an opinion.

Not an opinion about everything, and certainly not architecture theatre for the sake of proving you are Senior.

They want someone pragmatic.

Someone who can recognise when a simple solution is enough, when reliability genuinely matters, when a team should prototype first and when it needs to slow down and design something properly.

What you will be doing

Your responsibilities will include:

- Leading end-to-end delivery of significant product features
- Taking work from problem definition and scoping through design, build, testing and production release
- Proposing technical approaches for non-trivial engineering work
- Writing or contributing to technical design documentation
- Making sensible implementation decisions without escalating every detail
- Working closely with the Engineering Team Lead on architecture and technical direction
- Giving thorough and constructive code reviews
- Helping less experienced engineers work through technical problems
- Keeping engineering work moving when the Team Lead is unavailable
- Participating in planning and providing realistic estimates
- Identifying dependencies, delivery risks and blockers early
- Recognising technical debt, performance issues and architectural risks before they escalate
- Designing clean boundaries between frontend, APIs, services and data




- Making thoughtful relational data-modelling decisions
- Working with authentication, authorisation, RBAC and protected application flows
- Maintaining appropriate input validation at system boundaries
- Ensuring testing exists where it genuinely reduces risk
- Thinking about observability, logging, error tracking and production health
- Breaking large changes into sensible, reviewable and deployable increments
- Writing documentation that means your systems do not depend on your memory
- Helping establish consistent engineering patterns without abstracting everything into oblivion
- Making pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions
- Connecting technical decisions back to the student and business outcome

The technical environment

The broader stack includes:

- TypeScript

- React
- Next.js

- PostgreSQL

- Supabase
- Go

- Deno

- APIs and microservices

- Prisma or similar ORMs

- AWS

- Vercel

- GitHub Actions

- CI/CD

- Vitest / Jest

- Cypress / Playwright
- Infrastructure as Code tooling such as SST or Pulumi

Nobody expects you to have collected every technology above like Pokémon. What matters most is the engineering underneath it.

TypeScript depth is particularly key, as is genuine experience working with PostgreSQL and relational data.

Strong modern React experience may compensate for lighter Next.js exposure if you understand the underlying framework and server/client principles.

Go, Deno, Supabase and the exact infrastructure tooling are valuable, but strong adjacent experience and the ability to learn quickly are absolutely relevant.

What we are looking for

This role suits a genuinely hands-on Senior Software Engineer who has moved beyond simply completing technically difficult tickets.

You will ideally bring

- Strong, recent TypeScript experience
- Strong modern React/full-stack web capability
- Next.js experience or highly transferable framework knowledge

- Meaningful PostgreSQL experience
- Strong relational data-modelling capability
- Backend and API engineering depth
- Experience taking significant work from early idea through production
- Technical design and architectural decision-making experience
- Strong understanding of frontend/server boundaries
- Experience with authentication, authorisation and application security

- Mature testing judgement

- CI/CD and deployment experience

- Cloud/infrastructure awareness
- Strong pull request and code-review discipline
- Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers
- Excellent written and verbal technical communication
- Comfort working with ambiguity and incomplete information
- The confidence to make decisions without needing approval for everything
- The judgement to know when you actually should escalate something

Startup, scale-up or lean product-engineering experience would be particularly valuable because this is not an environment with a specialist team waiting behind every technical problem.

The kind of Senior Engineer who will thrive here

You are probably someone who can look at a problem and say:



"There are three reasonable ways we could build this. Here's the one I recommend, here's why, and here's the trade-off we're accepting."

You will also be comfortable saying:

"We don't need to solve that yet."

or:

"This one actually does need more thought before we start coding."

You do not need to become a people manager.

You do need to be someone other engineers trust.

That means being responsive, clear and collaborative. It means documenting your thinking. It means raising risks before Friday afternoon suddenly becomes interesting for all the wrong reasons.

It also means caring about what the product is trying to achieve, not just whether the code is elegant.

What success will look like

Success in this role will be visible quickly.

You will be

- Leading major features from scope through to production
- Making sound implementation decisions with minimal direction
- Keeping work moving when the Team Lead is unavailable
- Helping other engineers resolve blockers
- Producing design thinking before diving into complex builds
- Identifying technical risks before they become production problems
- Writing PRs that other engineers can genuinely review
- Improving documentation and reducing knowledge bottlenecks
- Balancing quality, speed and scope appropriately
- Creating systems that are easier for the next engineer to understand
- Giving leadership clear technical explanations when required
- Building technology that improves the experience of students and the teams supporting them

Why this role is interesting

This is a rare Senior role where the remit is genuinely broad without quietly turning into people management. You will remain close to the code while having meaningful influence over how things are built.

The engineering function is still lean, which means your judgement will matter.

The broader organisation is already substantial and growing quickly, which means the systems being built now need to mature alongside it.

For the right engineer, that combination is engaging: enough scale to have meaningful problems, but still enough room to shape how they are solved.

Location and package

This is a Melbourne-based hybrid role. The team currently works across Melbourne CBD and Glen Waverley, with approximately two in-person days each week. The current model generally involves one day around Glen Waverley and one in the CBD, although there is flexibility and the preference longer term is to bring the engineering team together in the most practical location.

Salary: $160,000 to $180,000 + 12% superannuation

Benefits include

- $60 per month flexible advantages allowance across learning and development, fitness, entertainment, news and media

- Flare Benefits access

- Novated leasing
- Eligible salary sacrifice for devices
- Gym membership support within the flexible benefits programme
- Confidential EAP support for team members and immediate family

Candidates must already hold Australian working rights. Employer sponsorship is not available for this position.

Could this be your next chapter?

If you are an experienced engineer who still loves building, enjoys solving messy product problems and wants enough trust to make meaningful technical decisions, this could be a very good place to apply that experience. You will not be expected to know everything.

You will be expected to think, communicate, take ownership and help the team keep moving.

📌 Senior Software Engineer - 2nd in Command (Melbourne)
🏢 Kindtide
📍 Melbourne