Staff Backend Developer

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Introduction:
Who we are…

Founded in 2002, ELMO Software is the trusted provider of HR technology solutions to 2,000+ mid-sized organisations and more than one million end users across Australia and New Zealand.With a comprehensive suite of ISO-certified solutions that span the full employee lifecycle, ELMO Software is designed to scale as organisations grow. Flexible and configurable, ELMO’s one-stop HRIS fits to your specific needs and workflows.Through powerful technology, automation, data and analytics, ELMO Software empowers HR professionals to play an integral role in company decision making.

Life & Culture...

At ELMO you will be joining an epic team with the opportunity to make a big impact. We foster an authentic, collaborative, fun working environment and being an ELMOnian means you're part of an amazing team that will push you to grow, support you with challenges and allow you to shine. Some of our benefits include:

• Hybrid work set up
• Paid Parental leave - 12 weeks primary, 6 weeks secondary
• Birthday leave, YOU day each year, as well as connecting people leave (up to 2 weeks working from anywhere)
• Inhouse Learning and Development initiatives
• ELMO Social and Diversity clubs
• Wellbeing initiatives such as boot camp, yoga etc.
• Mental Health/EAP programs
• Flare Benefits (great discounts, novated leasing, salary sacrifice)

Our values:
Reimagine What's Possible - We believe innovation is human at its core. By staying open, fearless, and adaptive, we continuously push boundaries - while keeping people at the heart of everything we do.
Obsess over Customers – Everything we do is designed to positively impact our customers.
Help Others Thrive - Be they colleagues, communities or customers, we champion ways to help others thrive.
Be Fearlessly Optimistic - We bring unwavering positivity to any challenge, as we know it will drive meaningful change.

Please note: Our internal Talent Acquisition team has got this covered, we’re not open to using an agency for this role.

Description:
The Opportunity:
We’re building something new from scratch, and we need an engineer who thinks beyond code.

This is a Staff-level position within a newly formed product squad. You’ll help drive the technical direction of a greenfield product built on Node.js, React, and AWS. We expect you to shape what gets built, not just how it gets built. You’ll challenge requirements, propose alternatives, spot gaps before they become problems, and drive the squad’s delivery with the kind of judgement that only comes from years of building production systems.

This role requires engineers who have fundamentally changed how they work using AI. We’re not talking about autocomplete suggestions. We mean engineers who are constantly challenging norms and re-inventing the software product development lifecycle. As part of this, you should already be intimately working with Claude Code or Cursor leveraging the latest models, delegating entire implementation tasks to agents, reviewing and steering AI-generated code rather than writing every line by hand, and using tools like Claude’s skills and project context to maintain quality at speed. If you’ve reached the point where your primary role is directing, reviewing, and refining agent output rather than manual coding, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.

Why this role exists:
ELMO Software is a leading HR technology platform serving over 2,000 organisations across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. We’re in a phase of significant product investment, decomposing our monolith into modern services and building new capabilities from the ground up. This squad is one of those new capabilities—a greenfield project with real autonomy and clear business impact.

We’re not looking for someone to fill a seat on an existing team. We’re building a squad around experienced engineers who can operate with minimal direction and high ownership. The tech is modern, the constraints are real (multi-tenant SaaS, ISO-certified security, enterprise customers), and the problems are interesting.

What You Will Do:
Drive the Technical Direction of a New Product

Help shape a production system from first principles—contributing to pattern choices, engineering standards, and architectural decisions alongside the squad.
Write and review code daily. This is a hands-on role. You’ll be in the codebase, not just drawing diagrams.
Make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality. You know when to take a shortcut that’s reversible and when to invest in doing it properly.
Apply strong architectural thinking to a greenfield build — designing clean service boundaries, thoughtful API contracts (REST and GraphQL), and data models that will hold up as the product and platform scale.

Think like a Product Engineer

Challenge requirements constructively. If something doesn’t make sense for users or won’t scale, say so—and come with alternatives.
Understand the customer problem, not just the ticket. You’ll work directly with product to shape what gets built and push back when the scope is wrong.
Care about outcomes, not just output. Shipping features that nobody uses is not success.

Work at the Frontier of AI Engineering

Use Claude Code or Cursor with Opus as your primary development environment. You delegate implementation to agents, provide precise context and constraints, and review the output with the same rigour you’d apply to any team member’s code.
Understand and leverage advanced AI workflow patterns—Claude skills, project context files, multi-file scaffolding, iterative agent refinement—to maintain consistency, quality, and velocity across the codebase.
Know when to trust the agent and when to intervene. You have the engineering depth to catch subtle issues in AI-generated code: security gaps, performance anti-patterns, architectural drift, and edge cases that agents miss.
Continuously push the boundary of what you can effectively delegate. You treat AI tooling as a teammate whose capabilities you’re actively developing through better prompts, better context, and better workflows.

Keep Pushing Straight Forward

AI tooling, engineering practices, and the way we build software are evolving rapidly. You stay across what’s changing and bring that knowledge into the squad—whether it’s a new model capability, a better testing pattern, or a workflow improvement that saves everyone time.
Champion strong engineering fundamentals—clean architecture, meaningful tests, clear documentation, thoughtful code review—while continuously questioning whether there’s a better way to achieve them.
Mentor other engineers through pairing, knowledge sharing, and leading by example. You help the squad grow collectively, not by prescribing how to work but by demonstrating what good looks like and creating space for others to contribute.
Drive improvements to developer experience, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and team practices. If something is slowing the squad down, you surface it and work with the team to fix it.

What We Are Looking For:
We care more about what you can demonstrate than what’s on your CV. Degrees are welcome but not required—we’ve seen exceptional engineers come from all kinds of backgrounds.

Must Have:
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Node.js and TypeScript in production environments.
Strong experience with modern Node.js frameworks (NestJS, Fastify, Express) and a solid understanding of when to use what.
Active, constant use of Claude Code or Cursor with Opus-class models as your primary development workflow. This is non-negotiable—we’ll ask you to walk us through your setup, your prompt patterns, and how you’ve structured your workflow around agent-driven development.
Familiarity with Claude skills, CLAUDE.md files, or equivalent project-level context patterns that enable agents to produce consistent, high-quality output across a codebase.
A product engineering mindset—you think about users, outcomes, and trade-offs, not just technical elegance.
Experience designing and building systems on AWS (or comparable cloud platforms).
You understand patterns like domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and service decomposition, and you know when to apply them and when to keep things simple
Strong opinions, loosely held. You can advocate for a technical approach and also change your mind when presented with better evidence.
Excellent written and verbal communication. You can explain complex decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Valued Experience:
Experience with React.js for full-stack delivery.
Experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers (Kafka, SQS), or service decomposition patterns.
Track record of working in multi-tenant SaaS environments with enterprise security requirements (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or similar).
Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical initiatives within a squad or team.

The Role:
This is a squad that builds together. You’ll be a driving force in the team’s technical direction—contributing to architecture decisions, shaping standards, and helping ensure what ships is something the whole squad can build on with confidence. When the team hits a hard problem, you’re one of the people who helps break it open. The squad shares ownership of what it delivers, and you’re expected to bring the experience and initiative to make that ownership meaningful.

How We Work:
We ship frequently. Our teams deploy multiple times per day and we measure cycle time, not lines of code.
We take security seriously. ELMO is ISO 27001:2022 certified and pursuing ISO 42001:2023 for responsible AI. Every engineer is expected to think about security as a first-class concern.
We’re pragmatic about process. We use agile practices because they help us deliver, not because of dogma. Ceremonies exist to serve the team, not the other way around.
We invest in AI tooling. Our engineering organisation has achieved over 90% adoption of AI-assisted development tools, with measurable improvements in cycle time and deployment frequency. This isn’t a future aspiration—it’s how we work today.
We value engineers who think. The best code is often the code you don’t write. We’d rather spend time understanding the problem than rushing to a solution.
This is a greenfield project, so you’ll have genuine input into technical choices. The current direction includes Node, Typescript, NestJS/Fastify, React, Event-driven with Kafka, Bedrock, AWS and Kubernetes.

Cover Letter Questions:
At ELMO, we expect Staff Engineers to use Claude Code or Cursor with Opus as their primary environment. In your cover letter please share answers to the following:

1) Please describe a recent commercial project where you used Opus, Claude skills, custom MCP servers (like Figma or Playwright), or CLAUDE.md context files to build a complex feature. How did you structure the project context to ensure the agent maintained architectural consistency across the codebase?

2) Being a Staff Engineer involves 'levelling up' the team. How have you specifically taught or mentored other developers to transition from manual coding to agent-driven development? Provide an example of how you helped a peer move away from 'writing every line' to 'directing and reviewing' agent output.