Staff Software Engineer

Finstro; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Finstro is building a new Credit Decisioning Engine and a set of core lending data services. This senior technical builder role is hands-on and contributor-level, reporting to the Head of Engineering.

You will architect, implement, review, and operate the production stack and dashboards. You will drive architecture and governance for data ingestion, credit policy, and risk calculations while mentoring the team and shaping standards for reliability and auditability.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on backend engineering with deep experience in distributed service design.
• Ability to set direction and write code in a new team without a playbook.
• Fluency across backend languages (Java, Go, TypeScript/Node) and AWS; infrastructure as code.
• Experience with observability, metrics, tracing, and SLOs to support production systems.
• Ability to explain technical risk and trade-offs to executives.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and technical direction for the Credit Decisioning Engine and related services.
• Define modular data acquisition from credit bureaus, banking feeds, and open banking interfaces.
• Design versioned credit policy assets, tests, and independent releases.
• Ensure correctness, auditability, and replayability of decisions with shadow runs and backtests.
• Build observability into services to track latency, cost, and data lineage.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring while writing production-grade code.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

AWS

Observability

AI coding tools

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Finstro is building a new Credit Decisioning Engine and the pipeline that runs our internal credit workflow. It is the first of several major builds on the roadmap, and this role is the senior technical builder across them. Expect your scope to move with it: credit workflow tooling, integration with core lending and ledger systems, and the data services that feed risk and reporting. This is a hands-on individual contributor role reporting to the Head of Engineering. You set the architecture, then you build it - you will be in the code, in the design reviews and in the production dashboards.

About Finstro

Finstro is a fast-growing non-bank lender, providing businesses with cash flow, flexibility and confidence every step of the way. We go beyond rigid product silos and understand speed is only a part of the answer.

Since 2012, we’ve supported the growth aspirations of over 6,000 businesses through over $2.5b of funded transactions.

If you have energy, ambition and want to work for a dynamic, rapid growth, FinTech business, there are exciting opportunities to advance your career by joining our global team.

Principal Accountabilities

• Architecture and technical direction. Own the design of the engine and the services around it: boundaries, orchestration, what gets versioned. In twelve months, it is live on real volume, and the team can extend it without you.
• Modular data acquisition. Credit bureaus, banking and open banking feeds, accounting platforms, identity and fraud providers plug in behind stable interfaces. Adding or replacing one never touches decision logic.
• Credit policy as a versioned asset. Design how rules, policies and models are expressed, versioned, tested and released, so Credit and Risk move at their own pace and policy ships independently of the platform.
• Correctness, auditability and replay. Any decision can be reconstructed with the inputs used and the policy version applied. Proposed changes are shadow run and backtested against history before they go live.
• Observability built in. Instrumentation is part of building a component, not a later phase. From telemetry alone: which sources were called, which policy version applied, what was decided, and what it cost in third-party data. You own the latency and availability objectives.
• Standards and technical leadership. Define how we build, test, deploy and run services in this domain, then hold the line through review and working examples. Mentoring is valued, though we hire for technical depth first.

Key Skills Required

To excel in this role you will need strong hands-on backend engineering with real depth in distributed service design, and the judgement to make architectural decisions that hold up under audit years later. You are pragmatic rather than dogmatic, and comfortable being the person who both sets the direction and writes the code. Because this is the first Staff hire into a new team, you will need to work well without an established playbook: choosing the stack, setting the standards, and writing things down clearly enough that others can build on them. Fluency across backend languages (Java, Go, TypeScript or Node), AWS, infrastructure as code, observability and integration-heavy engineering is expected, as is the ability to explain technical risk and trade-offs to Credit, Risk and executive audiences.

Position Requirements

• Strong hands-on backend engineering with real depth in distributed service design. Java, Go, TypeScript and Node are all in play; the stack is still open, and your view will shape it.

• Designing and operating services on AWS, built cloud native and defined as code.

• Demonstrated ownership of production observability: instrumentation strategy, metrics and distributed tracing, service level objectives, alert design, and diagnosis under time pressure.

• Integration-heavy engineering: third-party APIs with uneven reliability, contract and schema management, versioning, and graceful degradation when a dependency fails.

• A testing strategy that goes past unit tests: contract testing, deterministic replay of production scenarios, and evidence that a change is safe before it reaches customers.

• Strong written and verbal communication, from engineers through to executives, including teams across time zones.

• Effective use of AI coding tools, with a clear view of where their output can and cannot be trusted.

Preferred

• Financial services or lending domain experience: banking, non-bank lending, payments, credit risk or core financial infrastructure.

• Credit decisioning, scorecards, rules engines or risk platforms.

• Designing for audit and privacy by default: data lineage, access control and retention.

• Australian obligations relevant to lending: the Privacy Act and credit reporting, the automated decision-making transparency requirements commencing December 2026, and the Consumer Data Right.

• A regulated or audited environment (ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS or APRA-aligned).

Working Arrangement

The role is based in our Sydney CBD office five days a week for the first six months while the team and its ways of working are established, moving to a hybrid agreement thereafter.