Software Engineer (Backend Focus)

Yojee; Sydney; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Yojee is seeking an experienced Software Engineer (Backend focus or Fullstack) to join our product squad and deliver real backend work from day one: distributed systems, real-time freight events, data orchestration, and the reliability work that keeps mission-critical workflows alive.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and other engineers as a product engineer: someone who owns the why as much as the what.

Qualifications

• 4–6 years of production backend experience with at least one deep system.
• Elixir/Phoenix experience, commercial or strong project work.
• Distributed/event-driven architectures with concurrency handling.
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge and data modeling skills.
• Hands-on AWS, Docker, and CI/CD experience for production workloads.
• Ability to articulate AI-assisted delivery concepts in engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Elixir/Phoenix services for real-time events and high-volume data.
• Take ownership of work end-to-end and ensure deliveries meet scope and quality.
• Contribute to architecture decisions and trade-offs early.
• Write production-ready, well-tested code and participate in reviews.
• Improve tooling, CI/CD, and IaC practices across the team.
• Operate deployments and performance tuning of live systems.
• Apply coding agents and MCP-style tooling to deliver features.
• If fullstack, implement frontend elements in React/TypeScript.

Skills

Elixir/Phoenix

Distributed systems

AWS

Communication

React/TypeScript (bonus)

Tools

PostgreSQL

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Be part of something.

Every time a shipment moves, Yojee makes it visible, intelligent, and efficient.
We’re not building dashboards for clicks.
We’re building technology that actually moves the world — optimising how freight flows across air, ocean and road.

Logistics is a global industry with real operational complexity. With MOSAIC and TCMS, we are building products that handle real-time events, high data volume, and mission-critical workflows.

If you’re an experience backend engineer executing reliably today and ready to start owning more — pushing back on briefs, supporting teammates, and influencing how things get built — this role is for you.

The Opportunity

We're hiring an experienced Software Engineer (Backend focus or Fullstack) to join a product squad and deliver real backend work from day one: distributed systems, real-time freight events, data orchestration, and the reliability work that keeps mission-critical workflows alive.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and other engineers as a product engineer: someone who owns the why as much as the what. You’ll deliver well-scoped services across Elixir / Phoenix — distributed systems, real-time freight events, data orchestration, and reliability work that keeps mission-critical workflows alive — and help shape the patterns, abstractions, and quality bar the wider engineering team relies on.

The role is set up for growth: you'll be given progressively more ambiguous problems, expected to take initiative beyond the assigned ticket, and supported to grow into end-to-end ownership over the next 6–12 months.

This isn't brochureware or content management. You'll be working on enterprise-grade, data-intensive applications where performance and state management matter to global logistics networks.

Agentic AI is a real part of how we work — across our SDLC and inside the product. We use coding agents, agentic prompting, and MCP-based tooling in day-to-day delivery, and we're building native agentic AI into the platform itself, not a bolted-on chatbot. You'll grow your craft inside that environment, not separate from it.

What You’ll Do

• Design and Implement Services in Elixir / Phoenix: Build reliable services that handle real-time freight events and high-volume data. Make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, correctness, and maintainability.
• Show Early Ownership: Take responsibility for completing work without leaving loose ends. Follow through after release — verify what shipped behaves as expected, and start thinking about how your work fits the broader feature and system, not just the ticket.
• Contribute to Architecture Decisions: Review specs, challenge assumptions, and align before coding. Raise feasibility and trade-off questions early, when they’re cheapest to resolve.
• Write Production-Ready Code and Reviews: Clean, well-tested, consistent with team standards. Give useful feedback in code review — catch real issues, including in AI-generated code, not just style nits.
• Enforce Standards via Tooling: Use and improve our tooling (formatter, Credo, Dialyzer/Dialyxir, CI checks) to keep Elixir best practices and code style consistent across modules — automated where possible, deliberate where not.
• Operate What You Build: Participate in deployments, troubleshooting, and performance tuning. Work hands-on with our CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code — not just consume them.
• Use AI Deliberately: Use coding agents, agentic prompting, and MCP-based tooling as a real part of how you deliver. Apply the same critical eye to AI output as to any other code.
• (If Fullstack) Implement Frontend Elements: Build UI in React / TypeScript, maintain consistency of patterns across modules, and support genuine end-to-end feature delivery.

What You’ll Bring

• 4–6 Years of Experience: Building and shipping complex, production-grade backend systems professionally — with at least one or two systems you can speak to in depth, including how they failed and what you did about it.
• Elixir Experience: Commercial or substantial open-source / personal projects. Phoenix strongly preferred. Other BEAM-family or functional languages (Erlang, Scala, OCaml, Gleam) considered if Elixir adoption is realistic for you.
• Distributed / Event-Driven Foundations: Solid understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures — concurrency, message passing, consistency trade-offs, failure modes.
• Relational Database Depth: Comfortable modelling, querying, and reasoning about performance and consistency. PostgreSQL ideal.
• Real Infrastructure Experience: Hands-on with AWS, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code — not just familiarity. You've built or meaningfully extended CI/CD or IaC and can reason about what's happening in production.
• AI-Assisted Delivery: Practical experience using coding agents, agentic prompting, and MCP-style tooling to ship real work. You can articulate where AI accelerates you, where it misleads you, and how you validate its output.
• Initiative Beyond the Ticket: A track record of going slightly past the brief — fixing the adjacent thing, raising the trade-off no one asked about, leaving the codebase a little better than you found it.
• Collaboration and Judgement: Think and communicate before acting. Comfortable working through ambiguity with alignment, not cowboy coding. Honest about what you know and don't know.
• Communication: Clear, friendly, fast-moving, and direct. Comfortable working closely with product, design, and other engineers, and translating technical context for non-engineers.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with React / TypeScript if you're applying for the fullstack variant
• Experience building real-time or high-load systems
• Exposure to logistics, supply chain tech, or third-party integrations (ERPs, TMSs, telematics)
• Open-source contributions, particularly to tooling, libraries, or BEAM-ecosystem projects
• Comfort working across multiple services and modules
• Experience in greenfield projects or scaling-stage startups where you've had to set small patterns yourself

Why You'll Love Working Here

A Great Place to Work (Literally): Enjoy in-person collaboration 4 days per week in our Sydney CBD office in the heart of the city — close to great food, coffee, and transport.

Real Engineering, Real Impact: You'll work on meaningful product challenges with direct line of sight to operational users — concurrency, real-time events, data orchestration, and clear UI all matter here.

Shape What's Being Built: Our architecture is established but not rigid. There's room to grow into bigger problems as you progress, and to influence patterns as you do.

Small Team, Big Autonomy: No bureaucracy. Direct line to product, design, and leadership. You get context, ownership, and visibility from day one.

Growth With Meaning: This is a place for builders who want to leave a mark on something real. We use a published levels framework, so progression on craft, scope, and leadership is a real conversation — not a guessing game.