AddressAbout us:
SKUTOPIA is a fast-growing Australian deep technology logistics startup. We’re building innovative ecosystems that power the booming e-commerce industry. Our team is driven to create innovative products, a sustainable planet and society, and on a mission to democratise and decarbonise logistics.
At SKUTOPIA, we offer unique products that are revolutionizing the e-commerce industry. Our SaaS solution empowers businesses to efficiently manage orders, inventory, shipping, and warehousing across multiple storefronts. Our RaaS (Robotics as a Service) solution, a testament to our deep technology focus, enables merchants to fulfil online orders at unprecedented speed and quality, leveraging our in-house software, AI, and computer vision technologies.
Working at SKUTOPIA, you will face engineering challenges far greater than, say, scaling a financial app, game, or SaaS solution to millions of users. We shift atoms, not bits, and that changes the stakes. For example, instead of recovering from an application error by simply updating a row in a database, it could also require a truck to drive from one city to another! As you can imagine, our reliability requirements are not only significant, they are a crucial component in our defensive moat. Meanwhile, our application software has to solve NP-Hard problems, and our business rules are complex by necessity.
That means you will be doing the most interesting work of your career alongside the most talented, caring, and hardworking colleagues you will likely ever have. We regularly challenge industry hype and assumptions to find new insights and innovative solutions because “best practice” simply isn’t good enough at SKUTOPIA. For example, we still use containerisation, but we threw out Kubernetes! And we designed our application architecture so a single vCPU application server backed by a single vCPU database can handle 100,000 HTTP POST requests per second.
Right now, we’re scaling up Engineering and looking for Senior Platform Engineers to empower and scale our Product Engineering teams. You’ll need to have experience at scale or in a rapidly scaling business and be comfortable with our tech stack, but we’re keen to chat if you think we might be a good fit for each other.
What we’re working with:
We’re working with Node, React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Postgres. Most of our applications use Event Sourcing and all of our code follows Functional Programming. We use Pulumi for IaC and our applications run on Google Cloud Platform, but most of our engineers started with only AWS experience and found it easy to get up to speed.
Read our Platform Engineering Strategy for a deep dive into Platform Engineering @ SKUTOPIA, but the high level overview is:
- Platform as a Product: Engineers are the customer. Platform teams use Product techniques to maximise impact on business objectives. Including telemetry measuring platform feature usage to find opportunities for improvement.
- Platform users own what they use: Product squads are responsible for their infrastructure; platform tools make it easier. The Platform team must not become an Ops silo which bottlenecks engineering.
- Encapsulate Complexity, Enforce Governance: Reduce cognitive load by providing easy-to-use packages that implement critical policies and complex solutions.
- Secure First: Platform teams implement security policies and enforce security governance in the tools they provide, with support from security engineers
- Financial Observability: Platform components include a chargeback system tracking expenditure against vertical, squad, and repository. Product engineers then get rich insights about their costs and optimising them. Simultaneously tracking expenditure against platform components will enable Platform to optimise costs across SKUTOPIA.
Plus the usual responsibilities regarding reliability, mentoring Engineers, developing or improving processes and practices, setting up golden paths, and generally ensuring that doing the right thing is as easy as falling off a log.
Whilst it's a fast-paced, high-growth environment, we aren’t sacrificing quality and are committed to building things right. We adopted evidence-based best practices including trunk-based development, continuous deployment, and test-driven development, then enhanced them with sophisticated release management practices such as release channels, rollouts, etc; Everyone is empowered to move fast with confidence.
We believe it’s important to be clear about where we’re going and transparent about how we’ll get there, so we have open-sourced our Technology Strategy and Engineering Roles Canvas. Both are available on our Careers page if you’re keen to check it out.
How we work:
Most of the team works from home, and we trust you to manage your time — if you’re getting your work done and you’re most productive at 8pm, that’s fine by us. We are collaborative and communicative, so if you need help or can help someone else, we expect you to reach out.
We keep track of what’s happening with Linear and Confluence and use Slack and Google Meet to stay in touch. We also use incident.io to manage our incident response and learning process, and we use a mix of asynchronous and synchronous communication to limit unnecessary meetings.
We have:
- A monthly all-hands business update which ensures we find opportunities to call out great work and celebrate our wins.
- A fortnightly demo and debate session where everyone in technology can bring ideas to the table or challenge how we do things.
- Squad health check every six weeks ensure we build a happy, transparent and psychologically safe environment.
Career progression:
It’s important to us that we take the time to understand your goals and give you an environment where you can learn with clarity about what progression looks like.
We make it clear what you need to do to move up, for example, from a senior to a lead role, and we’ve got paths that give you opportunities to either stay technically hands-on or progress into people leadership roles.
We’re forecasting serious growth in the business over the next couple of years, so we’re confident that there will be plenty of challenges and opportunities to develop your skills. It’s definitely not going to be boring!
Recruitment process:
If you’re keen to find out more, apply via the link.
If you don’t have a CV to hand, a link to your LinkedIn profile or other online presence is absolutely fine.
You’ll have a quick chat with our recruitment team, a technical interview (including live coding OR an at-home assignment if you prefer), and then a final interview that talks through your career history. We know interviews are a two-way process, so we’ll take the time to tell you more about the role and team, answer all your questions, and schedule additional chats if necessary.
tl;dr
- Technically challenging role with a level of complexity that we don’t think you’ll get in many other places
- Node.js, React.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, Pulumi, GCP
- Sensible, trust first, approach to getting work done
- High growth environment where we aren’t sacrificing quality
- Defined paths and plenty of opportunities for career progression
- Send us your CV/LinkedIn profile/whatever tells us enough about you to get the conversation started
#LI-DNI
When you join us, you’ll be an important pillar of a rapidly growing startup. From day one you will be challenged to take risks, think big and make an impact while getting lots of love and support from the team. With our expected growth over the next 12 months, this is a role with plenty of breadth and variety where you can grow with us and be proud of what we achieve together.
We are an equal opportunity employer and proudly welcome people from all diverse backgrounds. When you join SKUTOPIA, we want you to bring your whole self to work and we value your unique contribution.
What's next?
If you're keen to find out more, apply now with your resume and we'll be in touch soon. After an initial screening call, you can expect an initial ‘getting to know you’ meeting to provide more detail about the role and answer your questions. We may then provide a skills-based task followed by a final interview.
Still on the fence?
We know that statistically, some groups are less likely to apply for a role than others, depending on their perception of whether they meet some or all of the criteria. If you have most of the things we're looking for, we encourage you to apply!
