Back End Developer

See Me Please is an accessibility testing startup based in Sydney, connecting organisations with diverse testers — people who are blind, have low vision, are deaf, neurodivergent, older adults, and others — to provide authentic accessibility insights and UX testing services. We're building a digital-native platform to scale our impact globally, starting with Australia and expanding to the UK and US. $1.42m in non-dilutive funding secured, preparing for Series A.

Working at See Me Please

Working at See Me Please means fewer layers, fewer hand-offs, and far more ownership than you've probably experienced before. There's no architect above you handing down designs, no narrowly scoped microservice waiting for you, and dare we say it… no appetite for over-engineered abstractions that don't earn their keep. You'll see opportunities everywhere, make judgement calls with incomplete information, and put architecture into production that the whole team will live with.

If you're looking for a tightly scoped backend role with a pre-built service boundary and clearly bounded tickets, this won't be the right environment. The role has a backend bent: that's where you'll spend most of your time. But you'll need to be genuinely full-stack and adaptable. As observability, analytics, and platform work become more autonomous over time, priorities will shift toward wherever the business needs you. If you want real ownership over a meaningful slice of the stack, working closely with people who'll push your thinking, and you take design and process as seriously as code, this may be the role for you.

Why this role is different (and unusually strong for a startup)

While we are an early-stage company, we're not an idea-stage product. See Me Please has proven demand and established credibility, working as an enterprise service with organisations including Westpac, the Australian Government, multiple state governments, and leading universities as our early-adopting customers. The backend you'll help shape is processing data that those organisations are making real decisions on — about accessibility, risk, and service design.

Your work here is deeply purposeful. You're not writing CRUD endpoints for products that never see daylight — you're shaping the systems that turn lived experience into insights that enterprise customers act on, and that create meaningful paid work for testers with lived experience of disability.

This is a rare backend role. Our stack is Go on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB single-table, Postgres, EventBridge — heavily serverless today, and not all of it is in the right shape. You'll work across a backend that has grown organically across a wide surface area: data ingestion pipelines, video and audio processing, accessibility analytics, LLM-driven analysis, and the APIs that customers and testers interact with daily. Some of this is well-fitted to Lambda. Some of it isn't. Helping us figure out what stays serverless and what shouldn't is part of the work — and you won't be doing it alone, you'll be making the calls with the team.

You'll have real ownership over a meaningful slice of the backend: APIs, data flows, integration patterns, performance, and the patterns the rest of the team reaches for. You'll work closely with our Platform Engineer on the application/infrastructure boundary, with our Design Engineer on the surfaces customers touch, and with the founder team on the technical strategy that takes us from one market to three.

You'll also collaborate with academic computer science researchers on long-term, genuinely interesting problems at the intersection of accessibility, data, and applied AI — work that goes well beyond CRUD and looks firmly to the horizon.

While we're a startup, we have exceptional backing. We are supported by equity-free funding from the Australian Government, recognising the innovation and social value of our product. We're now at a pivotal moment: very early, with proven customers, and intentionally investing in product depth, platform maturity, and revenue growth as we scale into our first international market.

And finally, the team. No startup cosplay here. We're a small group of seasoned technologists and operators who've consciously escaped big-org bureaucracy to build something meaningful, modern, and refreshingly unburdened by process for process's sake.

What You'll Do

• Take ownership of a meaningful slice of the Go backend — APIs, data pipelines, event-driven workflows, integration surfaces — and evolve it as we scale.

• Help us figure out what should stay on Lambda and what shouldn't. Sustained workloads, video/audio processing, and LLM pipelines are the obvious candidates. We'll make these calls together.

• Contribute to the data architecture across DynamoDB (single-table design) and Postgres — schema design, access patterns, migrations.

• Drive measurable backend performance — latency, throughput, query performance, cost-per-request — and help own the metrics customers actually feel.

• Shape how we handle the harder backend problems alongside the rest of the team: video and audio processing, LLM-driven analysis, real-time accessibility insights.

• Help establish the patterns the rest of the engineering team consumes — error handling, observability, API conventions, testing discipline.

• Partner closely with the Platform Engineer on the application/infrastructure boundary, with the Design Engineer on the surfaces customers touch, and with the founder team on technical strategy.

• Help shape the patterns and ways of working that will need to scale as we expand into new markets.

What You Bring

• Strong design instincts and good engineering judgement — you think before you build, and you write code that other people enjoy reading.

• You take design and process seriously. Not heavyweight ceremony, but the kind of pragmatic discipline that compounds: writing things down, thinking through edge cases, getting feedback before you build, and reviewing your own work before others do.

• Comfortable in Go, or coming from a similar typed language and excited to deepen in it. We're more interested in how you think than how many years of Go you've shipped.

• Experience working with video data at scale — ingestion, processing, analysis, transcription, or related pipelines. A massive amount of our technology centres on video data; this is one of the harder problems we'll be working on.

• Effective with modern AI tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar). We treat these as force multipliers, not a crutch — the engineers who use them well ship at a level above their years.

• Comfortable with SQL and data modelling. NoSQL/DynamoDB experience is a plus; willingness to learn it is required.

• Experience with event-driven or async architectures — and the kind of bugs they produce.

• Full-stack adaptable. The role has a backend bent today, but you'll flex across the stack as the business calls for it. Comfortable doing what's needed, in whatever language and stack the work requires.

• Comfort in a startup: priorities shift, ambiguity is the steady state, and systems are far from perfect.

• Clear communication and a collaborative mindset.

3–5 years of backend experience is probably about right, though we care more about evidence than tenure.

Nice to Have

• Experience building LLM/AI pipelines — retrieval, evaluation, prompt design, or evals.

• Multi-region data sovereignty experience, especially for regulated customers.

• Familiarity with sqlc, Atlas, or other type-safe SQL tooling.

• Background in regulated environments (government, financial services, healthcare) — bonus given our customer base.

• Open source contributions.

What You'll Shape

• The architecture and quality of a meaningful slice of our backend as we scale into new markets.

• The patterns that determine whether our backend stays a pleasure to work in.

• How quickly and reliably customers get insights from our platform.

• The technical decisions that determine whether we scale gracefully or accumulate debt.

This role will suit someone who enjoys evolving systems, not just maintaining them; where problems are visible, feedback is direct, and the impact of your work shows up quickly. If you read this and felt energised rather than anxious, we should talk.

Our Engineering Values

• Accessibility first: We build for everyone, testing with real users.

• Ship iteratively: Deliver value early and often.

• Own your work: Take responsibility from design through to production.

• Learn continuously: Embrace new technologies and approaches.

• Communicate openly: Share context, ask questions, give feedback.

• AI-fluent: We use modern AI tooling (Claude Code in particular) as a force multiplier, applied with judgment, not as a crutch.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary based on experience and role.

• Equity participation in a growing startup.

• Flexible working arrangements.

• MacBook Pro and home office setup.

• Claude Code Max (5x) subscription, included for every engineer — we use AI tooling seriously and expect you to as well.

• Opportunity to make genuine impact on digital accessibility.

Location

We're headquartered in Sydney, Australia. These roles are based in Sydney — primarily in-office, with sensible flexibility to work from home as needed. We believe the work we're doing benefits enormously from being in the same room often: workshops with testers, design crits, architecture conversations, and founder huddles all happen better in person. Expect to be in the office most days. This isn't a remote role.

How to Apply

Send your CV and a brief note about why you're interested to ***email_hidden***. We'd love to hear about a project you're proud of and what drew you to this role.

See Me Please is an equal opportunity employer. We actively encourage applications from people with disabilities and those from underrepresented backgrounds.