Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

Property Shell; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Property Shell, Melbourne, seeks an experienced software engineer to own and shape substantial features across a growing SaaS platform. You will work across frontend, backend, and data layers, shaping architecture and UX while maintaining momentum in a small, highly autonomous team.

You will turn ambiguous business problems into reliable software, balancing speed and quality. A strong product mindset and willingness to push for scalable, global-ready solutions are essential.

Qualifications

• Proven track record delivering production software at scale.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into practical solutions.
• Strong product thinking and user-centric mindset.

Responsibilities

• Design and build significant new functionality across the Property Shell platform.
• Turn complex business problems into scalable software solutions.
• Work across frontend, backend, databases, APIs, and wider platform architecture.
• Contribute to technical and architectural decisions as the platform evolves.
• Think about UX, workflows, simplicity and business value.
• Determine what should be modernised and what should be evolved progressively.
• Turn broader product objectives into clear development work.
• Provide planning and structure to a small engineering team without bureaucracy.
• Communicate technical decisions, progress, risks and trade-offs clearly.
• Challenge technical approaches constructively and defend your thinking.

Skills

Full-stack development

System design

Product thinking

UX awareness

Communication skills

Independence

Tools

React.js

PHP

Yii2

MySQL

APIs

Mobile apps (iOS/Android)

Job description

This role is for an engineer who likes hard problems: ambiguous requirements, architectural trade-offs, legacy constraints, new technology, and turning all of that into something simple and scalable.

Property Shell isn't a large engineering organisation where you'll own one small part of a system, receive finished requirements from a product team and spend weeks getting decisions through layers of people.

Our engineering team is small. The product is not. And our aspirations are bigger again.

We're building a sophisticated SaaS platform that sits at the centre of how property developers, project marketers and real estate sales teams manage leads, customer interactions, stock, sales, contracts, payments, reporting, integrations, automation and increasingly intelligent workflows.

That creates some genuinely interesting engineering problems.

• How do you take a complicated real-world process and make it feel simple to a user?
• How do you design something flexible enough to work across very different organisations without creating unnecessary complexity underneath?
• When should part of an established platform be modernised, and when is rewriting it simply engineering for engineering's sake?
• How should AI actually change a CRM beyond adding a chatbot to it?
• How do you keep a growing SaaS platform moving quickly while making technical decisions that will still make sense years from now?
• How do you take a platform built successfully for one market and evolve it into technology that can scale across countries, customers and increasingly different ways of doing business?

These aren't theoretical exercises. They're the kinds of problems we're solving now.

And because our engineering team is small, the people solving them have a meaningful influence over what the product becomes.

About Property Shell

Property Shell is an Australian-built SaaS platform designed specifically for property developers, project marketers and real estate sales teams.

Our platform brings together CRM, leads, stock, sales, contracts, payments, reporting, communications, workflows, automation and integrations within one central system.

We've spent years building the product, developing deep industry knowledge, solving the hard foundational problems and establishing ourselves in the Australian market.

The next chapter is about scale and new technology.

We want to take what we've built and grow Property Shell into a global technology business, with North America a major part of that next stage.

For engineering, that creates a different set of challenges.

Scaling isn't simply about adding more customers. It's about making sure the product, architecture and way we build can support more organisations, more users, more integrations, different markets, different workflows and requirements we haven't encountered yet - without losing the speed and simplicity that got us here.

The decisions we make now will influence what Property Shell looks like at several times its current size.

That's part of what makes this role interesting.

We're not looking for someone to join once everything has already been figured out. We're looking for someone who wants to help figure out how we get there.

And our ambition isn't simply to build another CRM.

We want to continue pushing what technology in our industry can do - solving difficult business problems differently, questioning established workflows and continually exploring what comes next.

Why This Role Is Different

You'll join a small Melbourne-based engineering team and work alongside our existing team as a senior technical voice within the business.

This isn't about introducing another layer of management.

We want experienced engineers working side-by-side, bringing different strengths, challenging assumptions constructively and collectively making better product and technical decisions.

You'll remain highly hands-on. The majority of your time will be spent designing, problem-solving and building.

But we're looking for someone whose contribution goes beyond producing good code.

Someone who can take an ambiguous business problem, understand what we're actually trying to achieve, ask the right questions, think through the UX, data, architecture and edge cases, then turn that thinking into something practical that can be built and shipped.

You'll have unusually broad influence over the product.

You'll work closely with the people making product and commercial decisions, and have meaningful input into architecture, UX, technical direction and what we invest in next.

There aren't multiple layers between identifying a better way of doing something and being able to pursue it.

And as we move into our next stage of growth, that influence becomes even more important. We're making decisions now about how the platform evolves, how we increase our development velocity, how we scale internationally and what technologies we invest in for the years ahead.

We value good engineering discipline, but we're not interested in process for the sake of process.

High autonomy. High accountability.

Build the right thing. Keep it simple where possible. Architect for what matters. Ship it. Then make the next version better.

What You'll Do

• Design and build significant new functionality across the Property Shell platform.
• Take complex or loosely defined business problems and turn them into thoughtful, scalable software solutions.
• Work across frontend, backend, databases, APIs, integrations and broader platform architecture.
• Contribute heavily to technical and architectural decisions as the platform evolves.
• Think beyond requirements and consider UX, workflows, simplicity and business value.
• Help determine what should be modernised, what should be progressively improved and what should remain.
• Help turn broader product objectives into clear, executable development work.
• Bring planning, clarity and structure to a small engineering team without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Communicate technical decisions, progress, risks and trade-offs clearly.
• Challenge technical approaches constructively and be equally comfortable having your own thinking challenged.
• Help maintain high engineering standards while balancing architecture, speed and commercial outcomes.
• Identify opportunities to simplify both the product and the underlying architecture.
• Explore new technologies and development approaches that could genuinely improve our product or the way we build software.
• Help us think through what needs to change technically as Property Shell moves from an Australian platform towards a product built for global scale.
• Play a meaningful role in how Property Shell's technology evolves as we expand internationally.

The Engineering Environment

Property Shell is an established production platform. Our core technology environment currently includes:

• React.js
• PHP
• Yii2
• MySQL
• Web-based SaaS/CRM architecture
• APIs and integrations across a growing ecosystem of external platforms
• Mobile and tablet applications across iOS and Android

Experience with our exact stack is valuable, but it isn't mandatory.

If you've worked deeply with comparable frontend, backend and relational database technologies, we'd still like to hear from you.

Good engineers can learn frameworks.

We're far more interested in how you think, how you approach problems and what you've built.

Product Thinking Matters

We don't see engineering as separate from product thinking.

If someone says: "We need users to be able to do X." We want an engineer who naturally starts asking: Why?

• What problem are we actually trying to solve?
• How does the user work today?
• Could we remove steps rather than add more?
• What happens in the edge cases?
• What should the underlying data model look like?
• How flexible does this actually need to be?
• Could the same architecture solve another problem later?
• What is the simplest experience we can give the user?

The best solution isn't always the most technically impressive one.

We're looking for someone who understands that.

What We're Looking For

This isn't an entry-level engineering role.

We're looking for someone who has already spent meaningful time building and shipping substantial production software and can operate with a high degree of independence.

You don't necessarily need a particular number of years behind you. Exceptional engineers develop at different speeds.

What matters much more is the level you've reached and the kind of responsibility you've already taken on.

You'll likely be able to demonstrate:

• Strong experience designing and building complex production web, SaaS, enterprise or business applications.
• Excellent full-stack software engineering capability.
• Experience independently owning significant features, systems or technical problems through to production.
• Strong software architecture and systems-design thinking.
• The ability to break down complicated or ambiguous problems and develop practical solutions.
• Strong product thinking — understanding that good software starts with the user and business problem, not simply the technical implementation.
• An ability to think about UX, workflows and simplicity as part of engineering a solution.
• Strong technical judgement and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Experience working with established systems where the answer isn't simply to start again.
• A track record of taking ownership and following things through.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical people.
• The ability to bring clarity, organisation and structure to a development environment.
• The confidence to question assumptions and challenge decisions constructively.
• The ability to make other engineers around you more effective without needing formal authority over them.
• A strong bias towards actually shipping software.
• Curiosity about technology and a genuine interest in what comes next.

You don't need to be a people manager. In fact, we're specifically looking for someone who still wants to be deeply involved in the software itself. Leadership in this role comes through influence, judgement, communication, initiative and the quality of your thinking.

You'll Enjoy This Role If...

• You enjoy difficult problems where the right answer isn't immediately obvious.
• You like being given the problem and having room to work out the best solution.
• You want to understand why something needs to exist before deciding how to implement it.
• You naturally think about product, UX, data and architecture together rather than as completely separate disciplines.
• You want meaningful ownership over the product and technology you're working on.
• You still genuinely enjoy writing software.
• You like looking at an existing system and working out how to make it better without automatically wanting to rebuild it.
• You want your technical decisions to have visible impact.
• You like working directly with other senior engineers and business decision-makers.
• You prefer a small, fast-moving engineering environment over layers of approvals and committees.
• You value good architecture and engineering discipline but don't believe process should become the work.
• You naturally think about how a product could be better rather than simply completing the next ticket.
• You're excited by the challenge of taking an established product and helping turn it into a globally scalable platform.
• You want to help invent what comes next rather than simply maintain what already exists.

How We Work

Our engineering philosophy is simple:

• Clear thinking
• Strong ownership
• Pragmatic engineering
• Fast, considered execution
• Simple solutions to complicated problems

We want enough structure to make us better and faster.

Not process for the sake of process.

We've laid the foundations. The next challenge is scale.

For the right engineer, this is an opportunity to join at the point where an established Australian product starts tackling the problems that come with becoming something much bigger.

And a small enough engineering team that your decisions can materially shape how we get there.

It's an opportunity to help determine what we build, how we build it, how the architecture evolves - and ultimately what Property Shell can become as we take it to a global market.