Senior Software Engineer

Dogs, cats, budgies and everything in between, pets deserve the world. They make us want to be better humans. That's why we've made it our mission to build the most engaged and passionate community of pets and pet parents across the world. And we're looking for talented teammates who can help us do it.

Founded in Sydney, our team of 500+ pet obsessives spans Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. We've scaled to become one of Australia's top five eComm companies and the number one online pet store. The pet industry is booming, $15 billion kind of booming, and online pet retail is continuing to grow exponentially. So this is a unique career opportunity to be part of our epic growth story.

The opportunity

As a Senior Engineer at Pet Circle, you are a hands on and strategic technical leader who shapes the architecture and technical direction of the squad, balancing delivery velocity with long-term system health across multiple domains. You extend beyond feature ownership to encompass multi-domain system design, proactive technical debt management, and structured mentoring of engineers at all levels. You'll be the squad's most trusted technical voice during major incidents and the engineer others turn to when difficult architectural trade-offs need to be made.

AI is part of how we engineer at Pet Circle, not a side experiment. Coding tools are in daily use across every chapter, and engineers actively shape how the team works with them - contributing to a shared library of internal skills and workflows, building agents that take on low-stakes tickets, and embedding AI review into every pull request. We use AI for planning and design, parallel development, code review, debugging and documentation.

What you’ll be doing

• Architecting solutions that span multiple domains or services, anticipating second and third-order effects, making explicit technical trade-offs, and documenting them in a way that informs the squad's long-term direction

• Providing structured, growth-oriented mentoring to engineers at all levels, with feedback that accelerates their progression rather than just correcting current work

• Owning the technical response to major incidents, diagnosing root causes, understanding blast radius, and driving the fix while the Tech Lead coordinates stakeholder communication

• Proactively identifying and addressing technical debt that is causing real problems including performance degradation, fragility, or delivery friction, and prioritising refactors based on business impact

• Spotting architectural risks before they become incidents, and writing technical documentation including RFCs, runbooks and ADRs that elevates the entire team's understanding of the system

• Establishing squad-level guardrails for AI tool adoption and code generation, defining what tools to use and how to use them safely, and architecting robust AI integrations with full consideration of cost, latency and security

• Translating deep technical challenges into clear business narratives for stakeholders, and challenging leadership respectfully when technical decisions need protecting

The ideal toolbox

• Extensive experience architecting and delivering complex, multi-domain technical solutions in a product-led engineering environment

• Deep stack mastery including strong working knowledge of React, Node and/or Python, plus hands-on experience with containerisation and orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes)

• A track record of leading incident response for major production issues, including root cause analysis and blast radius assessment

• Demonstrated experience proactively managing technical debt and driving architectural improvements that measurably improve system health

• Experience providing structured mentoring to senior engineers with demonstrable outcomes, not just peer support

• Experience establishing and enforcing coding standards across a squad, and writing technical documentation that others actually use

• A strategic approach to AI tool adoption: you can define guardrails, architect integrations, and evaluate trade-offs around cost, latency and security, not just output quality

• Ability to translate architectural decisions into compelling narratives for non-technical stakeholders

Role location

This role can be based anywhere across Australia. If you're in Sydney, you're welcome to work from our pet friendly offices to connect with your squad, the broader tech team, and the business. Either way, meaningful collaboration is core to how we work.

Juicy perks

• Heaps of development opportunities - stretch projects, secondments and unlimited learning courses via Go1

• Flexible working environment

• Up to 50% employee discount

• Product sample giveaways

• Pawrental leave and wellbeing leave

• Team charity volunteer days

Why Join?

We reckon our mission to help the world Pet Better is an important one, but also an incredibly fun and rewarding one. Becoming a Pet Circler means you’re committed to help shape an entire industry - it’s pretty exciting stuff. Here’s what we stand for:

• We're better together

• We operate with humble hearts and hungry minds

• Pets matter, so pets and pet parents always have a seat at our table

• We're instinctively curious. Always.

Belong at Pet Circle

Our unique perspectives and expertise is our superpower - we value diversity in all forms. So, no matter your background, please apply if this role makes you excited to bring your full self to work each day.