Technical criteria — MUST HAVE

- Strong TypeScript and Node.js (server-side)

- Builds backend services in TypeScript, not just front-end work

- Comfortable in a large, strictly typed codebase

- API design and contract management

- Has designed and versioned APIs used by multiple applications

- Understands backwards compatibility and how to change an API without breaking existing consumers

- OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect authentication

- Can explain and implement different authentication flows

- Understands token scoping, delegation and secure token handling

- AWS experience in a restricted enterprise environment

- Productive with limited access and permissions

- Familiar with load balancers, secrets management, caching and container services

- Can diagnose issues without full administrative access by working with platform teams

- Observability/Monitoring and Debugging across distributed systems

- Can trace a failing request through multiple layers — gateway, API layer, downstream services

- Uses logs, traces and correlation IDs systematically rather than by trial and error

- Testing discipline

- Writes unit and end-to-end tests as part of delivering work

- Experience with modern testing tools (e.g. Vitest/Jest, Playwright or similar)

- Up-to-date CI/CD and version control practices

- Works comfortably with git, automated pipelines, feature flags, release candidates and rollback

- Experience in a shared monorepo environment is an advantage

- Security and compliance awareness in regulated systems

- Default habits of least-privilege access and never exposing customer data or credentials in logs

- Thinks about authorisation on every request

Technical criteria — NICE TO HAVE

- GraphQL experience — schema design, performance, error handling





- Apollo Federation (version 2)

- Apollo GraphOS or Rover tooling — schema validation and monitoring

- Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring

- API gateway experience - Kong specifically

- MCP (Model Context Protocol) — building or running an MCP server

- Retail banking domain knowledge — accounts, customers, transactions, payments

- Effective use of AI coding assistants (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) in a large codebase

Non-technical criteria

- Excellent communication

- Provides updates proactively rather than waiting to be asked

- Raises blockers early, with context and a suggested way forward

- Sydney-based (Nice to have)

- Self-motivated with strong ownership

- Takes a loosely defined problem and comes back with a plan

- Does not wait for a fully specified ticket before starting

- Sees work through to completion, including the less interesting final detail

- Product and business-analysis thinking

- Asks why something is needed before deciding how to build it

- Spots missing requirements, edge cases and customer impact

- Genuinely switched on

- Absorbs new context quickly and connects information across different systems

- Works things out from first principles where documentation is missing or out of date

- Collaborative team member

- Reviews colleagues' work properly, pairs when it helps, shares what they learn

- Can disagree on technical matters without creating friction

- Reliable delivery at sprint cadence

- Breaks work into realistic pieces and give estimates they can stand behind

- Flags slippage as soon as it becomes likely, not at the end of the sprint

- Pragmatic judgement on quality versus speed

- Knows when to ship incrementally and when to stop and fix the underlying problem

📌 Graph QL Engineer (Sydney)
🏢 DWS
📍 Sydney