Forward Deployed Engineer

Reapit; City of Brisbane; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working policy

Brisbane/Sydney offices

Competitive salary & benefits

Job summary

Reapit is seeking a frontend specialist to embed with enterprise customers, solving real problems with rich frontend capabilities. You’ll leverage our Developer Portal, Reapit Connect, and the Elements design system to ship embeddable, high-quality UI components.

You will work closely with Product and customers, delivering proofs of concept quickly, and iterating based on feedback within a 24-month contract. Flexible working and offices in Brisbane or Sydney are available.

Qualifications

• Strong, recent React and TypeScript experience building production applications at scale.
• Comfort reading and building against backend/API contracts (our stack includes .NET/C#, PHP/Laravel, Kotlin/Java).
• Experience collaborating with Product and customers to scope and plan and turn vague asks into workable eng proposals.
• Ability to leverage platform integrations and Developer Portal to deliver richer solutions.
• Proven ability to deliver proofs-of-concept quickly and iterate on feedback.
• Ability to push back on vague specs and describe problems clearly; comfortable with multi-stakeholder environments.
• Experience working with distributed teams and cross-functional product/engineering/customer groups.

Responsibilities

• Meet with Product and customers to understand the real problem behind the ask and scope a plan.
• Provide solution options that may leverage Developer Portal APIs for richer capabilities.
• Write a short, dated engagement plan before you start building and revisit as scope shifts.
• Build a proof of concept quickly and iterate with Product and customer based on feedback.
• Create embeddable frontend solutions using React/TypeScript and existing platform primitives.
• Work with REST/GraphQL contracts and coordinate with backend teams as needed.
• Move between engagements as priorities shift and collaborate with distributed teams.

Skills

React

TypeScript

Frontend development

REST/GraphQL

DevOps basics

WCAG accessibility

SOLID design

Embeddable UI

Tools

Developer Portal

Reapit Connect

Elements design system

CLI tooling

Job description

Reapit is the original, end-to-end business technology provider for estate agencies of all sizes. We've been helping sales and lettings agents to build relationships and grow their businesses for more than 25 years. Our technology connects property professionals in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand with buyers, sellers, tenants, and landlords to power the relationships that change lives. Worldwide, Reapit technology is used by over 78,000 agents in more than 15,000 branches, with over a million properties under management.

What you'll be doing

This is a new role at Reapit, and it isn't a standard full-stack delivery position. You'll be embedded directly against a small number of named, strategically important enterprise customers who have a specific, unresolved problem standing in their way. Rather than patching that problem with the narrowest possible fix, your job is to solve it properly — using our Developer Portal and existing platform components to bring genuinely richer functionality into the customer's hands, taking the engagement to a different level.

Reporting to the Engineering Director for technical standards and delivery quality, you'll work in direct, day-to-day partnership with Product to understand which customer problems you're deployed against and why, and to make sure what you build is coherent with the wider product direction.

You'll work within an AI-enabled product delivery model, using Claude across the entire product delivery lifecycle — from Intent to Launch. Discovery, scoping, proof-of-concept, build, testing, and documentation are all accelerated with agentic tooling, so the team operates at a genuinely faster pace and ships value to customers earlier. This isn't AI bolted on at the edges — it's core to how the role delivers against compressed, engagement-based timelines.

Key Responsibilities

Discovery & Scoping:

Meet directly with Product and, where appropriate, the customer, to understand the real problem behind the ask — not what you're told to build, but what actually needs solving for that customer.

Come back with solution options rather than a single build, including where an option leverages a Developer Portal API’s to deliver something more capable than the customer originally asked for — and let Product and the customer choose, rather than defaulting to the first, narrowest interpretation of the ask.

Write a short, dated engagement plan before you start building: what you're building, what problem it genuinely solves, and what "done" looks like. Revisit it with Product if scope shifts.

Delivery:

Build a proof of concept first for anything non-trivial — get something in front of Product and the customer fast, then iterate based on what actually lands, rather than committing to a full build against your first-pass scoping.

Build fast, embeddable front-end solutions that draw on our Developer Portal and existing platform primitives (Reapit Connect for identity/integration, the Elements design system, and our CLI tooling), so what you ship can sit inside or alongside our core products without a from-scratch backend build.

Work primarily in React/TypeScript against existing API contracts. Where a genuine backend gap blocks the work, flag it back to the owning platform team rather than building new backend services yourself.

Move between engagements over the course of the contract as priorities shift — you are not fixed to a single account or codebase for the full 24 months.

Who we're looking for

At Reapit, we prioritise hiring individuals who share our values and possess the right attitudes and behaviours for success. Whilst some of the listed requirements may be important, don't worry if you don't meet all of them, we'd still like to hear from you.

Qualifications and Experience:

Strong, recent React and TypeScript experience building production applications at scale — Essential.

Genuine comfort reading and building against another team's backend/API contracts (ours are a mix of .NET/C#, PHP/Laravel, and Kotlin/Java) without needing to own backend delivery yourself.

Experience being the engineer in the room with Product and a customer — able to ask the right discovery questions and turn a vague ask into a scoped, buildable plan that solves the underlying problem rather than the surface request. You should be able to describe a time you did this and how the ask changed once you scoped it properly.

Experience turning a narrow customer request into a more capable solution by pulling in existing platform or Developer Portal integrations, rather than building the smallest possible fix — you should be able to describe a specific example and what made the richer solution worth the extra effort.

Comfortable working proof-of-concept first: getting something rough in front of a customer or Product fast, then iterating based on real feedback rather than over-specifying up front. You should be able to describe a POC that changed direction once real usage or feedback came in.

Comfortable working with minimal formal specification, and confident pushing back on a stakeholder who is prescribing implementation detail ("put a button here") rather than describing the underlying problem.

Experience working with distributed teams and multiple concurrent stakeholder groups (Product, core Engineering squads, and customers directly).

Technical Skills:

Deep proficiency in React and TypeScript, including hooks, state management (e.g. Redux, Zustand, React Query), and component design patterns, with component design that also favours embeddability — iframe, micro-frontend, or SDK-style integration into an existing product surface.

Strong understanding of modern front-end tooling — build tools, bundlers, linting, and testing frameworks (unit, integration, E2E) — including for fast proof-of-concept work that later needs to be hardened for production.

Comfortable consuming and lightly shaping REST and/or GraphQL contracts in collaboration with backend engineers, without taking on end-to-end backend ownership.

Familiarity with DevOps practices and tools, and exposure to public cloud platforms (preferably AWS).

Understanding of accessibility (WCAG) and performance best practices for production web applications.

Understanding of SOLID design principles and clean component architecture.

Comfortable working alongside or embedding into a legacy CRM front-end, including navigating the realities of running new and old systems side-by-side (e.g. iframe embedding, shared auth/session behaviour across systems) — even where documentation is limited.

Familiarity with working against a shared design system, a centralised identity/integration layer, and a developer-portal/app-ecosystem API layer (equivalent to our internal Elements, Reapit Connect, and Developer Portal), rather than building UI, auth, or integrations from scratch.

Familiarity with agentic AI development tooling, with an emphasis on moving quickly on compressed, engagement-based timelines — e.g. coding assistants, agentic workflows for test generation/debugging, and documentation automation.

Sound judgement about what not to touch without domain sign-off — for example, financial or trust-accounting logic — and a track record of escalating rather than quietly building it anyway.

Soft Skills:

Excellent stakeholder management — equally comfortable in a room with a customer, a Product lead, and an engineering peer.

Strong bias toward scoping before building; resists vague instructions and turns them into a short, written plan others can review.

Genuinely comfortable with engagement-to-engagement variety rather than a single long-lived codebase.

Proactive communicator who flags early if a build isn't going to genuinely solve the customer's problem, rather than quietly delivering scope that doesn't move things forward.

What your impact and success looks like

As this is a 24-month contract with no dedicated ramp-up runway, we're looking for someone who can ramp quickly and deliver a genuinely better outcome for the customer, not just code. Success in this role is judged jointly by Engineering and Product.

Within 2 weeks:

You've had a discovery conversation with Product on your first assigned engagement, and can articulate in a single paragraph what the customer's real problem is and why the obvious first fix wouldn't be good enough.

Within 1 month:

You've taken a first engagement through a proof of concept, tested it with Product and/or the customer, and iterated it into a shipped embeddable solution — built on existing platform components and the Developer Portal rather than a narrow point fix — with a short engagement plan Product has signed off.

Within 3 months:

You have a track record of turning ambiguous customer asks into scoped, deliverable plans that make genuine use of the platform's Developer Portal and integration surface. You're trusted to run discovery conversations directly with customers, and you're proactively redirecting work that belongs in BAU rather than absorbing it into your queue.

Within 6 months:

You've delivered at least one engagement that took a customer's use of the platform to a noticeably different level — not just resolving their original ask but demonstrating what's possible with the broader ecosystem. You're recognised by both Product and Engineering as someone who can be dropped into a difficult customer problem and come back with a genuinely better solution than the one first requested.

What's in it for you?

We operate a Flexible Working Policy and you are free to determine where you work from, be that from home or in the Sydney or Brisbane offices, and how often — but we certainly recommend a balance. We're offering the chance to shape a genuinely new function at Reapit, with direct, visible impact on how our customers experience the platform. You'll feel part of a special team. You can expect a highly competitive salary and some great benefits.

Don't tick all the boxes? Neither do we

We care about our industry and want it to become a more inclusive and diverse place to work. So, we're driven by hiring not only by experience and relevance for the role but by sharing our values and the right attitudes and behaviours for success. We are committed to Equal Employment Opportunity through attracting and retaining a complementary team of employees and building an inclusive environment for all. We feel we have an empowering environment where everyone is supported and respected, and we want you to feel this too. We welcome new ideas, thinking and approaches, whilst listening to all our employees.

“We are a 2025 Circle Back Initiative Employer – we commit to respond to every applicant.”