Staff Full-Stack Engineer / Founding Engineer

Staff+ level, 20 years of experience, using/evaluating LLMs in production
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Work expectations

Status
Actively looking
Not looking
Not looking
Open to new opportunities
Location
Sydney
-
Open to relocating
Commitment
Full-time, Join as a startup co-founder
Availability from time of offer
Immediately
Years of experience
7+ years
Top 3 languages or frameworks
TypeScript, Python
Also knows
Terraform, AWS, Docker, GCP, Google Cloud Platform, Hugging Face Transformers, Kubernetes, Linux, PostgreSQL, React
Preferred work environment
Hybrid, Fully remote
Strengths
I can grind through hardest problems, even if I hear about it for the first time, I will research, learn and adapt to deliver high quality software.
Interested in working involving
Small team. Doing hands-on coding. Interesting/challenging domain. LLMs/ML adjacent with opportunity to learn/apply ML more deeply.
Not interested in work involving

Gambling, military/defense, medium/big corporates with a lot of management layers and politics.

Other information
Able to work in Australia without visa sponsorship
Requires visa sponsorship to work in Australia

Pay expectations

Full-time
$
230000
per year
Casual / Contract
$
112
per hour
Pay is negotiable in exchange for equity
Pay is negotiable in exchange for equity
Pay is not negotiable in exchange for equity
Open to equity only roles
Not open to equity only roles

Referred by

  •  

Work experience

Proudest professional achievement
As one of two founding engineers in 2020 I built an AI concierge that sees, communicates to visitors using voice and connects them with company employees. Functioning MVP in 4 months, deployed at a sustainability-focused recruitment consultancy handling 20+ visitors a day before COVID hit. Recently, in a medical startup, I've built and evaluated end to end a citation system for LLMs to guarantee that every claim points to the ground truth for specialists in the loop to review.

Head of Engineering (IC + Engineering Lead)
Early-stage legal tech startup building a client intake platform for law firms
• Apr 2026 - Jul 2026‍

Brought in to re-architect and productionise an early-stage product and establish engineering standards across the team.

Achievements
• Designed, implemented and shipped a multi-tenant end-user privacy solution
• Built an e2e security testing suite across all routes and hardened authentication/authorisation across the platform; defined the target architecture and guidelines for the long-term implementation
• Created a standard pattern for dependency injection and testing, with documentation and agent skills to help LLMs apply it consistently

Day to day
• Owned the technical roadmap and architecture; refactored and productionised early-stage code, authoring, reviewing and evaluating refactoring tasks using LLMs
• Mentored a team of developers on LLM best practices and workflows, UI testing, directory structure, and authentication/authorisation for highly sensitive end-user data

‍

Lead Software Engineer (IC)
Australian R&D studio inventing and shipping AI-powered software, products and automation
• Oct 2025 - Apr 2026

Worked on a medico-legal reporting platform for specialists assessing workers' compensation claims: processing documents, screenshots and scans into LLM-generated summaries with citations, refined by specialists through LLM-assisted editing, then rendered into a final report.

Achievements
• Designed, implemented and evaluated a verifiable citation system for LLM agents to reference source documents
• Built programmatic verification of LLM outputs in TypeScript and an evaluation pipeline in Python using DeepEval (G-Eval, Relevance, Faithfulness metrics), plus meta-evaluations that score the G-Eval criteria themselves
• Built an evaluation dataset to test citation accuracy, using automated checks and multiple AI models to verify source references and relevance to claims
• Rearchitected output generation from a single large output to one section at a time, so each section gets a focused prompt, improving quality

Day to day
• Built an evaluation dataset visualisation tool using Textual to comb through thousands of lines of output and verify pipeline correctness
• Built markdown rich-text editors for medical professionals in the loop
• Created docx renderers for the final reports

‍

Staff Software Engineer (IC + Team Lead)
Browser-based GIS/3D platform
• Jul 2023 - Oct 2025

Senior Software Engineer (IC)
Browser-based GIS/3D platform
• Jun 2022 - Jul 2023

Achievements
• Led the design, security review, implementation and rollout of an authentication solution across dozens of microservices written in different languages and maintained by different teams
• Co-rewrote a legacy Ruby application in TypeScript with the team and retired the original
• Introduced developer tools for integration testing microservices or frontend apps locally against complex multi-service environments like k8s, without deploying
• Owned the GPU workload orchestration engine: improved performance and reliability under increasing load, cut pull request checks from half an hour to 5 minutes, and built a delivery pipeline that releases any monorepo component independently

Day to day
• Drove the migration of self-managed on-prem workloads to on-prem k8s with cross-zone availability
• Researched and architected the next-generation orchestration engine
• Promoted best practices and upskilled developers in developer tooling, monorepo design, unit and integration testing, AI and LLMs

‍

Head of Engineering (IC + Engineering Lead)

Startup building an entertainment platform for remote and hybrid teams • Jun 2021 - Jun 2022

Achievements
• Introduced TypeScript on both BE and FE and drove the conversion of 64% of the legacy JavaScript codebase, building the foundation for future products
• Implemented Connect product - a Slack bot to interact with users' teams
• Led the team to implement Check-in product and Billing via Stripe for the entire platform
• Optimised BE code build pipelines by code-splitting GCP functions using rollup, significantly reducing cold start times and HTTP 500 error rates

Day to day
• Introduced contract-first developer practices
• Polished CI/CD pipelines and implemented conditional deploys of only affected functions/front-ends
• Interviewed potential hires, mentored engineers, reviewed pull requests, architected new systems and contributed to key technical and product decisions
‍

Senior Frontend Engineer (IC)

Global design platform • May 2020 - Jun 2021

Core video team: improving reliability, performance and memory usage of video features across Web and hybrid Mobile apps.

Achievements
• Built a reliability dashboard for video features and used it to drive reliability improvements
• Contributed to the core editor team's code to optimise memory consumption and noticeably reduced crash rate on iOS devices
• Introduced new performance metrics such as FPS, with automated measurement and tracking over time
• Created A/B testing tooling to compare CPU, memory and FPS optimisations and distinguish genuine performance improvements from measurement noise
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Founding Engineer (IC + Architecture)

AI concierge startup • Nov 2018 - May 2020

One of two founding engineers; owned the event-driven architecture, audio processing server, human-in-the-loop UI, conversation event pipelines, CI/CD and infrastructure.

Achievements
• Shipped a functioning MVP in 4 months
• Designed and built a distributed hybrid cloud/on-premise real-time event-driven platform
• Researched and designed algorithms that combine cloud and on-premise speech-to-text models to improve transcription results
• Built real-time audio processing, speech synthesis, real-time messaging, distributed performance profiling and event tracing, and an NLP intent-response engine
‍

Senior Consultant (IC + Team Lead)

Award-winning Australian IT consultancy • Dec 2016 - Oct 2018

Consulted across a major bank, a telecommunications company and a retail business in Dubai - React Native, iOS, and platform work. Worked in small teams as a senior contributor and as an embedded tech lead in clients' teams.
‍

Earlier career in consultancies

Software consultancy companies focusing on .NET and C# • May 2005 - Oct 2016

Roles as Junior Developer, Senior Developer and Tech Lead.

Education

BSc in Mathematics and System Programming (Faculty of Computer Science and Cybernetics, Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Modelling)
Kazan State University • 2001 - 2006

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