Senior Backend Engineer (Django) - FinTech Platform

This is a hands-on senior role in a small team. You'll ship production code in your first week, then help shape how we build cleaner architecture, real test coverage, safer deployments and AI-assisted engineering workflows. You'll work closely with our Head of Engineering and Product, and be based in Melbourne, Australia.

We believe working closely with stakeholders and customers is key to engineering & product success so our client’s engineering team works closely alongside the commercial and product teams, to build a ground-breaking technology platform.

What you’ll do day-to-day

• Design, build and own backend services in Django and Django REST Framework that power our web portal, mobile app, and white-label environments.
• Work on the payments core: card issuing and lifecycle, spend controls, transaction handling, and webhooks from our 3rd-party partners.
• Build and harden existing features and integrate further workflow enhancements across the platform.
• Leverage AI tooling and ship AI-powered product features.
• Lead technical design: write design docs and ADRs, run decomposition sessions, and help simplify the architecture.
• Raise the engineering bar: grow test coverage & robustness, contribute to the engineering ways of working and the SDLC/AI-DLC.
• Own production quality: monitoring and alerting in Datadog, incident response, and an on-call rotation that meets enterprise SLAs.
• Review code, mentor engineers, and help raise the bar on AI tooling in everyday development.

Requirements

• 6+ years of backend engineering, with several years building and running production Django applications.
• Deep Django knowledge including the ORM, migrations, permissions, DRF, and async/background task patterns.
• Strong relational data modeling and PostgreSQL skills.
• A testing mindset: you write test suites as a matter of course and know how to bring testing patterns and the right level of coverage to an existing codebase.
• Experience shipping on cloud infrastructure with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Sound security instincts, including authentication and authorization with an identity provider such as Auth0 or Okta.
• Ownership: you drive work from design doc to production and stay accountable for it once live.
• Clear written and verbal communication, and comfort working directly with Product and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Any experience working in payments or financial services.
• Experience working in regulated environments.
• Experience in a fintech or startup scaling into enterprise customers.
• Datadog monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GCP.
• Resourceful and adaptable: You take ownership, solve problems, and get things done.
• A thinker and doer: You’re happy to roll up your sleeves and contribute wherever needed.
• Resilient and flexible: You thrive in a fast-moving environment and adapt to change.
• Driven by accuracy and integrity: You’re detail-focused, accountable, and do the right thing for customers.