Staff Full Stack GraphQL Engineer in Sydney

Our black belt specialists are leaders in their domains, serving as digital champions, delivery focused experts, top tier security professionals, AI thought leaders, and engineering best practice advocates. As 1 of Australia's fastest growing software businesses, Software at Scale delivers cutting edge technology solutions that power mission critical platforms. We solve complex engineering challenges at scale, driving quality, performance, and resilience through the strength of our people.

The Role and The Challenge

We are seeking an exceptional, highly energetic, and proactive Staff Full Stack AI & GraphQL Engineer who acts as an elite technical partner rather than a transactional ticket taker. You will inject momentum into complex enterprise environments, eliminate operational inertia, and lead the technical delivery of high-performance TypeScript ecosystems powered by advanced federated GraphQL. If you are content with picking up standard tickets, writing boilerplate code, or consuming basic APIs without understanding deep architecture, this is not the role for you. We want a true domain leader who brings high energy, challenges the status quo with respectful thought leadership, and takes complete architectural ownership of large-scale federated systems. You will step into a high trust and fully empowered environment where you will design domain-owned subgraphs into full-stack services, evaluate system performance, and own production operations end to end inside AWS.

Access to AI Tooling: We believe in removing friction so you can focus on solving hard problems. You will have full access to enterprise AI tooling, including Claude Code, to assist you in accelerating code generation, refactoring, and pipeline management.

Key Responsibilities

• Thought Leadership and Squad Uplift: Act as an energetic domain leader, energising engineering squads, providing constructive architectural guidance with empathy, and raising engineering standards from day 1.
• Federated GraphQL Architecture: Design and build production-grade federated GraphQL systems (supergraphs and subgraphs) using Apollo Federation, Apollo Router, or equivalent technologies, managing schema composition, breaking-change checks, and entity resolution across multiple teams.
• High-Performance Data Modeling: Model complex financial data domains, implementing DataLoader batching and caching patterns, query depth limits, complexity controls, persisted queries, and production introspection security.
• End-to-End TypeScript Mastery: Design and build high-performance applications using React, Next.js, and Node.js within complex monorepo architectures, ensuring optimal Core Web Vitals and secure server-side boundaries.
• AWS DevOps and CI/CD Automation: Deploy and scale workloads inside AWS, managing containerisation, automated GitHub Actions pipelines incorporating GraphQL schema validation, and secure secret management via secure vaults.

What You Bring (Attitude and Mindset)

• Consultant Identity: You present as a trusted technical partner who takes complete ownership of business outcomes, eliminates team friction, and drives solutions rather than waiting for top down direction.
• High Energy Thought Leader: You bring infectious enthusiasm, strategic vision, and hands on technical leadership to the team, acting as a true champion of engineering best practices.
• Proactive Problem Solver: You do not wait to be handed answers. When faced with broad or open ended problems, you pause, clarify boundaries and constraints, and collaborate to map out execution paths.
• Master of Constraints: You respect legacy design decisions and regulatory limitations while pragmatically navigating constraints to keep project momentum high.

What You Bring (Technically)

• Staff Level Expertise: Proven commercial experience operating at a Staff Engineer level within modern and high performing engineering teams, leading technical delivery and mentoring engineering talent.
• Federated GraphQL Mastery: Extensive hands‑on experience designing and building production federated GraphQL architectures, subgraphs, entity resolution, and performance tuning with DataLoader and complexity controls.
• Full Stack TypeScript Expertise: Deep and hands‑on expertise writing production‑grade TypeScript on both client (React, Next.js) and server (Node.js) tiers.
• Production Operations & DevOps Mastery: Extensive commercial experience deploying and operating workloads on AWS, managing CI/CD pipelines, containerisation with Docker, and distributed tracing telemetry.

What We Offer

• The chance to work for 1 of Australia's fastest growing and most innovative software businesses.
• Access to the latest AI tooling to assist you in achieving your technical goals.
• Meaningful and hands on engineering work solving truly interesting and complex problems.
• Clear growth pathways from Staff to Principal and beyond.
• A low ceremony and delivery focused environment that values engineers who own outcomes.
• Competitive remuneration and benefits.