Staff / Senior Staff Software Engineer - Reservations

Me U; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

me&u is seeking a Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the Reservations stream in Australia. You will own complex designs, work with product and design, and lead engineering initiatives across AI-enabled frameworks and distributed systems.

You’ll mentor teammates, review AI-generated and human code, and shape architecture while shipping robust, scalable solutions in a fast-growing hospitality tech environment.

Qualifications

• Agentic coding tools in production work: plan mode, worktrees, hooks.
• Experience designing and running distributed systems and microservices on a cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• Backend in TypeScript/Node.js, C#, Python, Java or similar languages.
• Frontend: React with relational or document databases, REST/GraphQL APIs.
• Quality: test-driven habits, observability, web security.
• Product collaboration with PMs and designers; able to talk to customers.
• Problem solving for complex, ambiguous problems; ability to map to buildable paths.
• Strong communication and system design documentation.

Responsibilities

• Co-create with product and design; turn customer intent into specs and stories.
• Direct and verify work; ship with accountability for production results.
• Build and maintain foundations for agents: context files, skills, hooks, lint rules, regression suites.
• Own initiative design; trade-off decisions across components and domains.
• Perform code reviews for AI-generated and human-written PRs with rigor.
• Mentor mid-level engineers; foster AI-enabled output improvements.
• Share knowledge; participate in engineering guilds and architectural discussions.
• Own customer outcomes and system impact; consider support load and billing edge cases.

Skills

Agentic coding

Distributed systems

Backend development

React front-end

APIs: REST/GraphQL

Test-driven development

System design

Communication

Attention to detail

Product collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

A little about us
When it comes to food experience, me&u helps you always feel like a local. The company's vision is to bring that feeling to everyone, anywhere. No matter what neighbourhood you live in or visit, you'll always know the perfect place to go and exactly what to order.
me&u is used by 6000+ bars, pubs, and restaurants to create memorable guest experiences and grow their brands. With 200 staff in five countries, and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, me&u is the consolidation of two leading hospitality technology companies: Mr Yum and me&u, who merged in November 2023.
The Engineering role is changing.
We're looking for a Staff or Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our Reservations stream. You'll take on ambiguous problems, own solution design and help shape the technical direction of the systems your team builds. We’re looking for someone whose judgment and standards lift the work of the whole team, not just their own.
We believe in full-breadth engineers, a.k.a the uncomfortably named 'broken comb' shaped people with multiple areas of expertise, who can deliver value end-to-end in a small, fully cross-functional team.
We build AI-natively. Agents do most of the implementation here; engineers shape the problem, write the specs and context that let agents succeed, and own the quality of what ships. You'll be expected to work this way from day one and lead by example, setting the standard for how the team works with agents. What good context looks like, which guardrails are executable rather than written down, and when AI output is good enough versus when it needs a human hand.
We already work this way: the AFR profiled how our engineers run agents overnight so their days go to customers and problems, not keyboards.

What you'll do

• Co-create with product and design: Sit in discovery & hear directly from customers. Then bring your technical acumen into shaping, and turn intent into specs and story slices that both humans and agents can work from.
• Direct and verify, then ship: Plan work so agents can execute it, review their output for logic and design rather than syntax, and take accountability for what lands in production.
• Build the foundations agents inherit: Maintain the context files, skills, hooks, architectural lint rules and regression suites that make our codebases safer to delegate into over time, not riskier.
• Own solution and system design: Lead the design of initiatives and features, working with product, design and the relevant custodianship leads to validate ideas and make trade-offs. Think across components and domains so solutions fit the system as a whole and the business goals behind them.
• Code reviews: Review AI-generated and human-written PRs with the same rigour. Enforce our conventions, make actionable suggestions, and help decide which classes of change can eventually be trusted with lighter review.
• Collaboration and mentorship: Pair with and mentor less experienced team members, including on how to work well with agents. Actively create room for mid-level engineers to grow, and make sure the team's use of AI consistently lifts its output.
• Knowledge sharing and technical leadership: Champion our engineering principles, take part in our engineering guilds and help shape our architecture and practices. When customer needs, tech debt and delivery pace pull in different directions, make a clear directional call and document the reasoning so people and agents can make follow-on decisions without escalating.
• Own the outcome: Guide your own work and the people and agents working alongside you towards timely, efficient delivery. Before shipping customer-facing changes, think through second-order effects, including support load, venue operations and billing edge cases, and adjust the approach without being asked. Own the customer outcome and the systems you build. Your job is to deliver value to our customers, not to get the code into production.

What you'll need

• Agentic fluency: Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex or similar) in production work: plan mode, worktrees, hooks, and choosing the right model for the task. You can show us a codebase you made easier for agents to work in.
• Distributed systems: Commercial experience designing and running distributed systems and microservices on a cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• Backend: Strong in at least one backend language such as TypeScript (Node.js), C#, Python, Ruby or Java. TypeScript/Node.js is a strong advantage.
• Across the stack: Comfortable in React on the front end and with relational or document databases on the back, and able to design and implement REST or GraphQL APIs.
• Quality and operations: Test-driven habits, observability (logging, monitoring, alerting) and practical web security.
• Product judgment: Experience working closely with product managers and designers, and comfort talking to customers directly. You can explain what you're building and why to someone outside engineering.
• Problem solving: Ability to take on complex, ambiguous problems and turn them into a clear, buildable path.
• Communication: Ability to write system designs, give constructive feedback in review, and keep stakeholders in the loop.
• Attention to detail: Willingness to take responsibility for the quality of engineering solutions, including performance, scalability and maintainability.

Nice to have

• Experience in hospitality, payments or another regulated, high-volume consumer domain.
• Experience with distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.

Why me&u?

Work with impact and purpose.

We’re helping the hospitality and entertainment industries to thrive, and me&u is at the forefront of this.

Work with great people.

Join a supportive, diverse, and inclusive team. You’ll have the freedom to experiment, learn, and have fun along the way.

Work that challenges you.

We’re growing quickly, which means endless opportunities to grow your career too.

Work that works for you.

Flexible, remote-friendly work with inclusive leave options, mental health days, and wellbeing support.

Diversity and Inclusion Commitment

We’re committed to growing and empowering an inclusive me&u community. That’s why we actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you require accessibility assistance at any stage of the process, please let us know.