Staff Product Engineer

STAFF PRODUCT ENGINEER

Engineering × Product | Hybrid — Melbourne preferred, open to remote across Australia | Full-time

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In a lot of senior engineering roles, someone else decides what to build. In this role, you’ll help shape what’s worth building, then build it, working alongside and supporting the rest of the team.

About Oho

Oho is a workforce safeguarding platform on a mission to protect vulnerable people and organisations from abuse and its impacts. We connect to 25 government registers to continuously verify right-to-work credentials across the entire employee lifecycle, from pre-employment screening through to ongoing monitoring. Today we're trusted by 150+ organisations to help protect 4.2 million vulnerable Australians across five high-stakes sectors.

Our products, Oho Recruit (faster, safer pre-employment screening) and Oho Continuous (re-checking credentials as often as every 7 days) sit at the point where compliance failures carry real human and organisational costs. The quality of our product and engineering directly shapes whether a child, patient, or NDIS participant is cared for by someone who is genuinely suitable to do the job, every week, not just at the point of hire.

We have built a new app so we can now attack an ambitious new product agenda, and we're looking for a Staff Product Engineer / Technical Lead to help us raise the bar on what’s worth building and how we build in our new platform.

Why this role, why now

AI is automating more of the “how” of software every month, which makes the “what” and the “why” more important than ever. So this role is less about writing code faster, and more about systemising product thinking and design: taking customer insights and a product vision and applying the technical depth to build the right products well, to the standard our regulatory tech domain needs.

This is a true product-and-engineering hybrid. You’ll help set the technical standard the team builds to and shape the product roadmap with the CPTO and CEO, while staying hands-on with the hardest, most important problems. We’re a small team, so you’ll have a big influence and work closely with everyone.

What you’ll own

• Product thinking, from customer and category insights to shipped. Turn customer insight and loose product briefs into products that customers trust and rely on. You;ll own design and experience, not just the backend. You’ll consult with the CPTO and CEO on the roadmap and help make sure the team is set up to execute on it.
• Raise the engineering bar. Set and uphold standards for code quality, testing, observability and operational excellence. Lead by example in code and design review. Make our defaults safer, our feedback loops faster, and our systems easier to reason about, and mentor engineers so the whole team levels up.
• Be accountable for what we ship. Care about reliability, security, and the integrity of verification results as much as velocity. In our domain, a wrong answer isn’t just a bug — it can be a safety risk. You’ll own PR reviews, technical guidance, and acceptance criteria.
• Champion AI in how we work and what we build. Lead responsible AI use to lift productivity, from developer workflows and code review to automating manual steps in verification and screening. Just as importantly, help shape where AI belongs in the product: high-value, well-bounded applications built with the accuracy, explainability and auditability we require.
• Shape the new app’s foundations. Co-design the architecture with the CPTO. Service boundaries, data modelling, API design, and the trade-offs of handling sensitive personal data at scale. Write the ADRs, run the design reviews, and make the calls that are hard to reverse. Help us expand the credentials we verify, standardise 23+ government-register integrations behind a clean layer, and develop new products.
• Help hold the line on quality and compliance. Partner with the team to keep our practices aligned with ISO 27001, so meeting the standard is a by-product of good engineering, not an audit scramble.

Why join?

• Real-world impact. Your work helps keep millions of vulnerable Australians safer. The stakes are real and the mission matters.
• Build something new. A new app and a roadmap full of unsolved problems — you’ll help shape it from the foundations.
• Real influence. In a small team, you’ll help set technical and product direction and have the autonomy to make it happen.
• Melbourne preferred; standout candidates anywhere in Australia considered.

What you’ll bring

• Product management experience. You’ve owned B2B product, not just delivered tickets: design and delivery, prioritisation and quality.
• Senior/staff-level engineering depth. Significant experience building and operating production software, ideally on data-intensive or integration-heavy systems, with strong system-design judgement across consistency, reliability, security and maintainability.
• A track record of raising standards on a team. Through systems thinking, architecture, mentorship, tooling and the example you set — not just shipping your own work.
• Customer obsession and design sense. You start with the user, care how the product feels, and can translate messy needs into clear engineering outcomes.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can take a loose problem like “standardise our integrations” and turn it into a clear plan and a shipped result.
• Nice to have: experience in regulated or high-stakes domains (healthcare, identity, compliance, fintech, govtech); identity verification, credentialing or trust & safety; designing extensible/plugin-style architectures; production AI/LLM experience; familiarity with ISO 27001 or SOC 2.

Our stack

You don’t need all of it. Day to day: Java 17, Spring Boot 3, GraphQL/REST on a schema-first, event-driven architecture with Kafka. React + TypeScript on the front end. Python and Node for verification and ingestion. MySQL/PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Neo4j. AWS on Kubernetes with ArgoCD, plus Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and OpenTelemetry.

Who this is for and who it isn’t

This is for you if you love to use systems thinking to raise the bar on product insights, delivery and engineering quality. You love to go deep into code. You get energy from mentoring individuals and a team to grow, you’d rather shape an outcome than be handed a set of tickets, and you’re already anticipating where AI can and can’t help product and engineering next, not just using Claude Code in the day to day.

It’s probably not the right fit if you prefer to have your work fully spec’d each week, if you like working heads-down and on your own, if you’ve moved fully into people-management and away from the code, or if your background is product but not hands-on engineering. This role really does need both halves.

How we work

These are the behaviors we are hiring for:

• Easy to talk to. Clear, curious and the person teammates can easily learn from.
• Start with the customer. Obsess over the people and orgs we keep safe.
• Earn trust. Through candour, reliability and credibility.
• Insist on higher standards. Raise the bar for yourself and everyone around you.
• Outcomes over output. We value impact and clarity over hours and busywork.

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Ready to apply? Tell us about a product you helped shape from customer insight to shipped result — and what you’d do differently next time.

Oho is committed to building a safe, inclusive workplace. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are happy to make reasonable adjustments throughout the hiring process.