Senior Product Engineer (Sydney)

Workyard is a fast-growing, venture-backed startup developing an innovative workforce management platform for the construction market. In an industry where $300 billion is spent annually on labor, we are fundamentally changing the experience for companies and workers by adding trust, transparency, and technology to workforce management — and enabling smarter business decisions. This high-impact role is perfectly suited for an experienced Senior/Staff Product Engineer who is excited by the prospect of working directly with the founders at an early-stage company to drive product adoption and revenue expansion. We're a small, focused team based in Sydney. Everyone here is a builder. We move fast, care deeply about the quality of what we ship, and take on new challenges without waiting to be asked. If you do your best work when there's real ownership, real stakes, and a product that actually matters to the people using it — this is the role. This is a hybrid role: 2 days in our Surry Hills office (Tuesday and Thursday), and 3 days remote. The Role This isn't a pure coding role. You'll write code roughly 60% of your time — but the other 40% is just as important: learning about our customers, understanding where the product falls short, shaping how it works, and owning the quality of the user experience end-to-end. If you want to spend 100% of your time heads-down in code, this probably isn't the role. If you want to have a real say in what gets built and why, and you're comfortable sitting in a customer call as easily as a code review — keep reading. What You'll Do Solution design: Take the brief, own what gets built and how. UX, architecture, data model, API, where complexity lives — your call. Trade-offs: Keep all stakeholders in the loop in plain terms (“X is 3 days, Y is 3 weeks but handles these edge cases”). Don’t silently cut or expand scope. Delivery: Own scope, sequencing, timeline, and any ceremonies. Communicate status proactively — no one should have to ask. Quality: “Done” means production-ready and moving the metric, not happy-path working. Own bugs, debt, monitoring, and on-call for what you ship. Cross-functional: Demo in progress, don’t wait for the end. Partner on launch readiness. Help support/sales/CS when your features are in an escalation. Build clean, fast, performant UI components with React and Next.js — things that work on a job site, not just in a demo Use Claude Code and AI-assisted development as a core part of your workflow — we expect our engineers to build faster and smarter with AI, not avoid it Implement complex frontend interactions: drag-and-drop, virtualised lists, real-time collaborative editing Profile and improve application performance — speed matters to contractors in the field Raise the bar on how we build: improve development processes, code quality, and delivery standards Our Tech You don't need to know everything here, but you should be comfortable working across this stack and excited to go deep where it matters. React and Next.js on the frontend TypeScript throughout Claude Code Laravel backend AWS infrastructure GitHub, Slack What We're Looking For Strong React and TypeScript fundamentals are non-negotiable. But we're hiring for more than technical skill — we want engineers who think like product owners and treat the customer's experience as their responsibility. Senior or Staff-level experience shipping complex frontend features in production React, Next.js, and TypeScript — real experience at scale, not just familiarity AI-native working style: you use tools like Claude Code day-to-day and stay current with how AI is changing how software gets built Customer instincts — you can sit in a user call, identify the real problem, and translate it into what should actually be built Product thinking — you care whether what you ship solves the problem, not just whether the code is clean Comfortable with ambiguity — you can pick up an underspecified problem and drive it to a solution without needing a detailed brief Low ego, high ownership — you'd rather ship something that helps contractors than protect your domain Strong communication — you can explain a technical decision to a non-technical founder and an engineering tradeoff to a customer in the same conversation What We Offer Direct access to founders and real influence over product direction Competitive salary and equity with employee-friendly terms Strong product and engineering culture - Regular team events and offsites Work-life balance (we mean it) How We Work There's no layer of middle management between you and the people making decisions. You'll work closely with the founders, own what you build, and see the impact directly — in the product, in customer conversations, and in the business. We care about output, not optics. Ship things that work. Solve problems that matter to customers. Stay close to the customer, because they're the reason all of this exists.