About the role

Halcyon Data is hiring a backend engineer in Sydney. You will design the data models, services and APIs everything else in the product depends on. The work is judged on whether it stays correct under concurrency, partial failure and three years of requirement changes, not on how quickly the first version shipped.

Australian offers are quoted excluding superannuation unless stated otherwise, so read the range below as base salary with super paid on top at the statutory rate.

What the work actually looks like

Expect a mix of new services, careful changes to old ones, and migrations on data that cannot be taken offline. You will write the design note before the code for anything substantial, and you will be the person who says out loud that a proposed change makes a guarantee impossible to keep. The team works a hybrid week out of Sydney, usually three days together and the rest wherever you work best.

What we look for

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will be expected to push back on requirements that do not make sense and to set the technical direction for your part of the product. We are looking for someone fluent in schema design and indexing who thinks about idempotency, transactions and ordering as a matter of habit. Depth in one server language matters more to us than a list of six.

Working at Halcyon Data

We work Australian Eastern hours, and the team is deliberate about not letting a distributed on-call roster turn into an always-on one. The range shown is the annual gross salary band for this role.

Responsibilities

Design and build services, their data models and their API contracts
Plan and execute migrations on live data without downtime
Make failure modes explicit: timeouts, retries, partial writes, replays
Instrument services so that production questions have fast answers
Review designs and code with an eye on what breaks in a year

Requirements

Several years building and operating server-side systems in production
Strong database fundamentals: modelling, indexing, transactions, isolation
Experience with authentication, authorisation and handling sensitive data
Comfortable with containers and a real CI pipeline
Writes clear design notes before large changes

Skills

API Design PostgreSQL MongoDB Docker Redis System Design

Benefits

Superannuation paid on top of the quoted base
Private health cover contribution
Four weeks of annual leave plus a quarterly wellbeing day
Flexible hybrid working

HD

Halcyon Data

New York, NY501-1000 peopleData Infrastructure

Halcyon Data runs the warehouse and streaming layer for consumer subscription businesses that have outgrown a spreadsheet but do not want to hire a data platform team. We ingest events, model them into something analysts can trust, and answer questions about churn and lifetime value that used to take a quarter.

Correctness matters more than throughput here. A pipeline that is fast and quietly wrong costs a customer a board meeting, so we invest heavily in lineage, replay and the unglamorous work of handling late and duplicated records.

We are headquartered in Manhattan with engineering in Seattle and an APAC team in Sydney that owns follow-the-sun on-call.

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