Staff Engineer

Culture Amp; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity via Employee Share Option Plan

Learning programs and coaching

Quarterly refresh days

Extended end-of-year break

MacBook and home workspace setup

Five annual social impact days

Medical insurance coverage for you and

your family (US & UK only)

Job summary

Culture Amp is seeking a Staff Engineer to help build the internal Agent Hub, a central technical capability for autonomous agents across the business. You’ll define architecture, patterns, operating model and guardrails to enable safe, production-ready agentic workflows.

You’ll be one of the founding members of a small high-ownership team, setting standards and building reusable capabilities that scale across the organization while collaborating with AI champions to ship real value.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering skills (TypeScript and/or Python), including APIs, testing, service design, and building production systems or integrations end to end.
• Hands-on experience delivering and operating cloud-native solutions in AWS, with a strong understanding of security, identity, permissions, secrets, and reliability in production.
• Practical experience with AI agents, Claude or similar tooling, MCP or comparable integration patterns, and orchestration across single-agent, multi-agent, workflow, and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Working knowledge of agent platforms and runtime concerns such as tool permissions, identity propagation, session state, token and time budgets, retries, evaluation, tracing, cost attribution, and auditability.
• Experience designing knowledge or memory architectures, including vector or graph-based retrieval, and the judgment to choose between build, buy, configure, workflow, and agentic approaches.
• A track record of taking ambiguous, unscoped problems from discovery through to a shipped and governed solution, earning stakeholder influence through delivery.
• The ability to define platform boundaries and self-service patterns so other teams can move independently without compromising security or operational quality.

Responsibilities

• Play a lead role in setting the technical direction for the Agent Hub’s foundational capabilities, including agent execution, orchestration, MCP tools, identity, context and knowledge, evaluation, and operational visibility.
• Design, build, and operate autonomous agents, workflows, and integrations for internal use cases—choosing thoughtfully between deterministic automation, simple tools, single agents, and multi-agent systems.
• Build reusable MCP servers and tool patterns, including clear schemas, credential brokering, identity-aware access, per-call authorisation, and auditable interactions with systems of record.
• Shape the knowledge and context layer that grounds agents in Culture Amp’s organisation-specific information, using appropriate combinations of document retrieval, vector search, knowledge graphs, registries, and semantic models.
• Establish the engineering practices that move solutions from laptop-based experimentation to managed services: secure deployment, testing, evaluation, observability, cost awareness, reliability, and safe human escalation.
• Partner with teams across the business to identify high-value problems, shape loosely defined opportunities, and deliver solutions that people actually adopt.
• Apply and evolve Culture Amp’s agent registry, risk framework, and governance patterns so every deployed agent has clear ownership, purpose, authority, data access, and accountability.
• Raise the capability of the wider function through coaching, architecture guidance, reusable patterns, documentation, and playbooks — enabling teams to move quickly within well-designed guardrails.

Skills

TypeScript

Python

AWS

AI agents

MCP patterns

Knowledge graphs

Security & reliability

Production systems

Tools

MCP servers

APIs

Vector search

Job description

We’re big believers in the power of IRL, so for most roles we ask Campers to work from their local Culture Amp office an average of 2 days a week to unlock connection, pace and culture together.

Join us on our mission to make a better world of work.

Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionizing how 25 million employees across more than 6,000 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high- performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day.

Culture Amp is backed by leading venture capital funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognized as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company.

For more information visit cultureamp.com.

How you can help make a better world of work

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to help build Culture Amp’s internal facing Agent Hub, the central technical capability for designing, shipping, and governing autonomous agents across the business.

This is genuinely greenfield. You’ll help define the architecture, engineering patterns, operating model, and guardrails that make agentic systems useful, secure, observable, and safe to run in production.

You’ll work across the wider business to turn ambiguous friction into practical solutions, while creating the platform and patterns that help teams build and operate AI-enabled workflows independently.

As part of this team of amazing humans

You’ll be one of the founding members of a small high-ownership team building Culture Amp’s agentic capability from the ground up. The Hub works as a central enablement function: setting standards, building shared capabilities, and helping teams across the business move from experimentation to governed, production- ready agents and workflows.

You’ll work closely with AI champions across the organisation. The team’s success depends on strong technical judgment, genuine collaboration, and a bias toward shipping solutions that create real value.

You will

• Play a lead role in setting the technical direction for the Agent Hub’s foundational capabilities, including agent execution, orchestration, MCP tools, identity, context and knowledge, evaluation, and operational visibility.
• Design, build, and operate autonomous agents, workflows, and integrations for internal use cases — choosing thoughtfully between deterministic automation, simple tools, single agents, and multi-agent systems.
• Build reusable MCP servers and tool patterns, including clear schemas, credential brokering, identity-aware access, per-call authorisation, and auditable interactions with systems of record.
• Shape the knowledge and context layer that grounds agents in Culture Amp’s organisation-specific information, using appropriate combinations of document retrieval, vector search, knowledge graphs, registries, and semantic models.
• Establish the engineering practices that move solutions from laptop-based experimentation to managed services: secure deployment, testing, evaluation, observability, cost awareness, reliability, and safe human escalation.
• Partner with teams across the business to identify high-value problems, shape loosely defined opportunities, and deliver solutions that people actually adopt.
• Apply and evolve Culture Amp’s agent registry, risk framework, and governance patterns so every deployed agent has clear ownership, purpose, authority, data access, and accountability.
• Raise the capability of the wider function through coaching, architecture guidance, reusable patterns, documentation, and playbooks — enabling teams to move quickly within well-designed guardrails.

You have

• Strong backend engineering skills (ideally in TypeScript and/or Python), including APIs, testing, service design, and building production systems or integrations end to end.
• Hands-on experience delivering and operating cloud-native solutions in AWS, with a strong understanding of security, identity, permissions, secrets, and reliability in production.
• Practical experience with AI agents, Claude or similar tooling, MCP or comparable integration patterns, and orchestration across single-agent, multi-agent, workflow, and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Working knowledge of agent platforms and runtime concerns such as tool permissions, identity propagation, session state, token and time budgets, retries, evaluation, tracing, cost attribution, and auditability.
• Experience designing knowledge or memory architectures, including vector or graph-based retrieval, and the judgment to choose between build, buy, configure, workflow, and agentic approaches.
• A track record of taking ambiguous, unscoped problems from discovery through to a shipped and governed solution, earning stakeholder influence through delivery.
• The ability to define platform boundaries and self-service patterns so other teams can move independently without compromising security or operational quality.

You are

• Energised by building something from zero — you’d rather define the pattern than inherit one.
• Comfortable holding ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and iterating in the open rather than waiting for a perfect plan.
• A systems thinker who can move between architecture, implementation, operations, and the human behaviours needed for adoption.
• Pragmatic about hype: excited by autonomous agents, MCP, and knowledge graphs, but focused on what creates measurable value and can be operated safely at scale.
• A generous, team-first collaborator who shares context freely, lifts the people around you, and treats the Hub’s success as more important than individual credit.

Perks & Benefits

At Culture Amp, our people are at the heart of our success. We offer competitive pay and a total rewards package designed to support you at work and in life. This includes:

• Equity through our Employee Share Option Program, so you can share in our long-term success
• Learning programs and coaching to help you thrive and grow
• Quarterly refresh days, an extended end-of-year break and a monthly allowance to support your wellbeing and lifestyle
• Inclusive parental leave from day one
• A MacBook and budget to set up your home workspace, enabling flexibility
• Five annual social impact days to give back to causes that matter to you
• Medical insurance coverage for you and your family (Available for US & UK only)

Our rewards are designed to support different needs and life stages, recognising that what matters most can vary from person to person.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds may hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every requirement, but your unique experience matters. If you’re interested in joining us, we strongly encourage you to apply and help us build a more diverse and impactful team.

Accommodations & Data Privacy

If you require reasonable accommodations or adjustments due to a disability to complete the online application or to participate in the interview process, please contact [e-mail] and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

Culture Amp will retain your CV & personal information for a period of two years (four years for the US) from the date of your application process completion. Culture Amp may contact you in relation to future job opportunities during this time period. For further information please see our privacy policy here or contact [e-mail].