Senior Software Developer
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This job ad is for the position of Senior Software Developer at one of Australia’s most unique and high-impact social enterprises. It’s for someone who is experienced in full-stack development, comfortable owning work end-to-end across a mature product stack, and cares about having a positive impact and making the world a better place.
But before you read on, we have something to tell you:
Stop Reading This Ad
Seriously, stop reading this ad right now.
In fact, do yourself a favour and take a break from looking at job ads altogether, and first ask yourself what you really want to do with your life.
You are going to spend most of your life working. Do you want it to mean something?
If You’re Still Reading…
Then it means your answer to the above question is probably “yes”.
Congratulations! That means you understand that doing something meaningful is what life is all about (you’d be surprised how many people haven’t figured this out).
You have probably also figured out that this isn’t an ordinary job ad. In our view, most job ads really, truly suck.
Most of them start by telling you how successful the company is, what a “unique” opportunity you have to join them (seriously, if you're working for a big company, how "unique" can it possibly be?), followed by a bunch of buzzwords describing the robotic tasks you’ll be told to do on a day to day basis.
Give us a break.
That’s why we hate posting job ads: the truly special role we want to tell you about gets drowned out by a sea of uninspiring rubbish.
But if you’ve read this far, it means we’ve AT LEAST got a shot of having your attention for a few more minutes, so here are the things you need to know:
Our Company
Stitch is an Australian technology-based social enterprise that addresses loneliness and social isolation for older adults, a critical issue in the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
We recently won a United Nations award that recognises the life-changing impact we have made improving lives around the world.
We have a passionate and growing community of members who tell us Stitch has changed their lives, with many telling us they felt they had nothing to live for before they found Stitch.
We’ve been covered by TIME Magazine, Bloomberg TV, the New Yorker, NPR, Huffington Post, and everything in between.
We love using our skills and ingenuity to combine modern technology with the power of community to solve one of the biggest problems facing society today.
And the community is now growing so fast, in such a variety of places around the world, that we're now looking for exceptional individuals to join our product development team to help us make an even bigger impact on the lives of our members by delivering great software.
Our Philosophy
We’ve got a very simple philosophy: Make the world a better place.
And when your members constantly tell you how much you have changed their lives, it’s easy to feel good about what you’re doing.
Seriously, look up the reviews for Stitch on Trustpilot, and you'll see a lot of our members saying that Stitch is the best thing that ever happened to them.
The Location
Our physical offices are in the Sydney CBD, but with this role, you won't be required to endure a daily commute. In fact, after the pandemic, our team voted to become a remote-first company. We all enjoy the flexibility that working from home provides, not to mention the extra chunk of our lives that we get to actually live, rather than spending on public transport or in traffic.
Having said that, we all know it's difficult to build good relationships over Zoom, so we come into the office once per week for team events, planning, and collaboration. Remote working can be great, but we'd all go crazy if we didn't spice things up with a bit of fun and social interaction.
That means the role suits someone who is a good communicator, likes working independently, and gets real satisfaction from doing good work, but also enjoys building genuine connections with the people they work with.
The Role
About the Role
We’re looking for a senior full-stack generalist who is comfortable owning work end-to-end across a mature product stack — from a Python/Django REST API through to an AngularJS web app — and who treats modern AI tools as part of how they ship, not a side hobby.
You’ll work across our backend services (Django, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Redis, Celery/RabbitMQ), our AngularJS frontend and shared client library, and AWS-hosted infrastructure (RDS, S3, CloudFront, SES, CloudWatch, and growing use of Bedrock and related AI services). Day to day that means building and improving product features, integrating third-party platforms (payments, messaging, realtime, media, analytics), and helping us use AI effectively — both in the product (moderation, evaluation agents, AWS AI services) and in how we develop (Cursor and similar AI-assisted workflows) to deliver products and features that make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of older adults.
We value breadth and judgment over narrow specialism. You should be happy jumping between API design, async jobs, frontend UX, cloud ops, and AI-assisted delivery, and comfortable working in a codebase that mixes established patterns with newer AI capabilities.
Love what you do
Candidates for this role need to enjoy everything about building applications for the web and mobile that actually get used — and loved! — by real end users. You'll enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from building new products and features, driving best practices, constantly learning, constantly improving.
If you're looking for an opportunity to take control of your own destiny, work on a great product with a fantastic team, and make a positive difference to the world, we'd love to hear from you.
Key Responsibilities:
This is more than just a traditional software role. You'll be designing and building modern applications, APIs and cloud services while helping integrate AI into our products and workflows. You'll have the opportunity to influence architecture, improve engineering practices and take ownership of end-to-end features that make a real-world impact on people's lives. You will:
- Own features end-to-end across Django REST APIs and the existing AngularJS web app / shared client library
- Work with senior leadership to define and deliver the next-generation application architecture and technology stack
- Work with PostgreSQL (including geospatial / PostGIS where needed), Redis, and async task pipelines (Celery + message broker)
- Build and maintain frontend experiences in a classic single-page architecture stack (AngularJS, client-side routing, build tooling, CSS preprocessing)
- Operate and improve services on AWS (compute, RDS, S3/CDN, email, monitoring, and related services)
- Integrate and maintain third-party platforms (payments, email/SMS, realtime messaging, push notifications, media upload, CRM/support, maps, analytics)
- Use and help expand AI in the product — e.g. OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, moderation / evaluation flows — with sound engineering judgment
- Use modern AI coding tools (Cursor and similar) to move faster on design, implementation, review, and debugging
Requirements:
To be eligible for this role you should have:
- Strong full-stack background — comfortable in both backend and frontend
- Solid experience with Python / Django or similar and REST API design
- Hands-on AngularJS or Angular expertise (or another mature SPA framework, e.g. React/Vue)
- Expertise with SQL / relational databases, ideally Postgres; caching and background jobs are a plus
- Practical AWS experience — deploying, debugging, and operating real services
- Comfort with third-party integrations and production systems that talk to many vendors
- Experience working in legacy or long-lived codebases — improving and transforming systems over time
- Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) and interest in LLM/AI APIs in product work
- Highly-developed coding skills
- Proven ability to set your own goals, be self-motivated and work without close supervision
- A passion for learning and constantly improving
- A demonstrated drive to succeed and commitment to excellence
- Strong attention to detail
- An easy-going and engaging personality
Extra bonus points for:
- Geospatial / maps experience
- Realtime systems (WebSockets, PubNub, or similar)
- Payments (Stripe / IAP) or messaging (email/SMS/push) at scale
- Hybrid / Cordova or mobile WebView exposure
- A track record of doing good or an interest in social causes
- Including the phrase "hypotenuse pineapple medicine" in your cover letter ... to indicate you actually read the application in detail before applying :-)
A resume and cover letter is required to apply. This part is very important. In fact:
IF YOU DON’T INCLUDE A COVER LETTER YOU WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS ROLE
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NOTE TO RECRUITERS: Please do not contact us about this role. You will be added to our junk email list.
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