Staff Software Engineer

dreamerlabs; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Above-market pay

Impact rewards

Growth without management

All meals covered

Company card

Great office

Team socials

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Dreamerlabs is building a new category of AI-driven entertainment in Sydney. You will own a product area end to end, from user insight to model-powered real-time experiences, and be on call for reliability, cost and scale as millions use the platform.

We operate in a fast, flat structure with founders actively involved. You will work in North Sydney, using the latest AI tooling, with a focus on ownership, impact and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• You’ve built something technically impressive at real scale or solved a hard problem and can explain what you did and why it was hard.
• You have product judgement: talk to users, form a view on what’s worth building, backed by evidence.
• You own end-to-end delivery, from problem to shipped product, and post-launch outcomes.
• You show rigour and pragmatism: ask the right questions, measure impact, and balance cost and quality.
• You communicate clearly with data, challenging ideas constructively.
• You’re curious about AI and new models/tools, with a fast learning trajectory.
• You’re driven to win and own something important.

Responsibilities

• Own a product area end-to-end, from understanding user needs to deploying on GPUs and measuring success.
• Be on call for what you ship, responsible for reliability, cost and scale for millions of users.
• Define what to build, when, and how, without handing off to others.
• Balance deep work with rapid experimentation to improve outcomes.

Skills

Built something impressive

Product judgement

End-to-end ownership

Rigour and pragmatism

Clear communication

Curiosity about AI

Hunger

Job description

About Dreamerlabs

Dreamerlabs is building a new category of entertainment: interactive experiences powered by AI characters, chat, voice, image and video, shaped in real time around each person. Entertainment has spent decades becoming more personalised, from TV to YouTube to TikTok. AI unlocks a second axis, interactivity, where the story responds to you. That is what we're building, and we're doing it at serious scale. In under two years, we have built one of the most-visited AI entertainment products in the world:

• 20 million monthly visitors

• A top 1,000 website globally

• 250 billion tokens processed every day

• 1.2 million images and videos generated every day

• 350+ model requests per second, served from our own GPU fleet

We've done it profitable and bootstrapped, and now we are scaling our engineering team as we launch new products on the platform.

Why engineers join us

We fine-tune and deploy models for chat, image, video and voice, build our own models in-house, and run hundreds of GPUs (H100s and B200s) across multiple data centres. We are one of very few companies in Australia that work this close to the metal on generative AI.

We're AI-first in how we build, too. Everyone works with the latest AI coding tools, and we're constantly experimenting with how great engineers can do more than ever with them.

The role

You'll own a product area end to end, the way a founder would. You will own understanding what users want from a given product, know what the latest models make possible, building everything from frontend and backend through to how it runs on our GPUs. You will then measure whether it worked and keep improving it.

The ownership is real. You decide what to build and how. You're on call for what you ship, you read the feedback, and you're accountable for reliability, cost and scale on a product serving millions.

Problems you could own:

• Long-term memory for AI characters. What should a character remember from a conversation that runs for months? Design how memories are written, ranked and retrieved across billions of messages within a fixed context budget.

• The For You feed. Own retrieval, ranking, cold start and experimentation, and measure the impact on engagement and retention.

• Frontier models, days after release. Evaluate quality and performance, understand the cost of serving at scale, and get the best models into users' hands fast.

• Real-time AI experiences. Work out how chat, voice, image and video come together, and make the quality, latency and cost trade-offs that make things like real-time video possible.

We're deliberately flat, with no levels and no management layers. The team includes former Heads of Engineering, Principal Engineers and founders who chose to be individual contributors because they love building, alongside engineers from Meta, Canva, Alibaba, Immutable, Relevance AI and Rokt. You'll work directly with the founders.

What we're looking for

We care more about what you've built and how you think than years of experience or a checklist of technologies. You might be a Staff, Principal or Distinguished Engineer, a tech lead who has shaped product direction, a former Head of Engineering, or a founder who wants to get back to building.

• You’ve built something impressive. A technically complex product at real scale, or a hard problem you went deep on. You can explain clearly what you did and why it was hard.

• Product judgement. You talk to users, form a view on what's worth building, and back it with evidence. Ideally you've owned a customer-facing product, not only internal platforms.

• End-to-end ownership. You turn an ambiguous problem into a shipped product without someone breaking it into tasks, and you own what happens after launch.

• Rigour and pragmatism. You ask the next question (which users, how much impact, at what cost), run the experiment and check the result. You know when to build properly and when the simple solution is right.

• Clear communication. You explain your thinking succinctly, with data, and challenge ideas constructively.

• Curiosity about AI. You keep up with new models and tools and quickly see how they could change the product. Deep ML experience isn't required; a fast learning trajectory is.

• Hunger. You want to win, hold yourself to high standards, and want the responsibility of owning something important.

Our product stack is TypeScript, Next.js, React, tRPC, Postgres, ClickHouse, Temporal and AWS. Our inference stack uses Python to serve LLMs, TTS, and diffusion image and video models on self-hosted GPUs. You don't need experience with all of it.

How we work

We work together in person in North Sydney, because things change fast and the best decisions happen in the room. We prioritise ruthlessly, test ideas in a day rather than planning them for weeks, and keep meetings and approvals to a minimum.

We think of ourselves as a competitive sports team with a real shot at winning. That means a high-intensity environment, and it's built for people who want exactly that.

What you’ll get

• Above-market pay. We reward exceptional people with above-market salaries and meaningful equity.

• Fast reward for impact. Compensation is reviewed every six months, with raises and bonuses tied to what you deliver, not your title.

• Growth without management. Your scope, influence and pay can keep growing while you stay hands-on.

• All meals covered. Breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, plus stocked fridges.

• A company card and unlimited workspace budget. For food, coffee, software, AI tools, equipment and the setup you need to do your best work.

• A great office. Dog-friendly, in North Sydney, with a big balcony for working outdoors.

• Optional team socials. Gym sessions, running, swimming, escape rooms and more.

• Visa sponsorship. For engineers relocating to Australia.