Fullstack Software Engineer (BE Leaning)

Meet: PlayHQ

• Founded: 2018
• Product: SportsTech SaaS product
• Head Count: 50
• Location: Melbourne CBD HQ
• Ways of working: Hybrid, 1-2 days in office

Tech Stack at PlayHQ

• Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
• API/App: Golang (primary backend language), GraphQL, gRPC, React, TypeScript, React Native, Microservices architecture, Service mesh
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Neo4j, Snowflake (data warehouse)
• Message Queues/Event Streaming: RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS (Simple Queue Service)
• Monitoring & Observability: Grafana, Sentry, DataDog
• Performance & Testing: k6 (performance testing), Load testing for high-traffic systems
• AI/ML Tools: LLMs for code generation, AI-assisted development practices, AI-driven architecture
• Architecture Patterns: Event-driven architectures, Distributed systems, Cloud-native architecture patterns, Resilient async systems

The Story

PlayHQ is on a mission to unleash the life-changing power of community sport. They are reinventing sport technology, replacing decades of unreliable legacy systems with a seamless, mobile-first digital experience.

They have built a strong foundation for a digital revolution in community sports. Now they’re entering a phase of rapid upscaling as they deliver innovative customer experiences, making it easier, faster, safer and more accessible for administrators, volunteers, players and participants to organise and take part in the sports they love.

The Role

We’re looking for a backend-leaning full stack engineer who’s ready to help PlayHQ deliver a seamless payments experience to millions of sports participants across the world. The systems you’ll build need to meet complex customer needs, solve scale challenges, and enable multi-regional payments, for our evolving global payment experience.

What you’ll get up to:

• Build and own payments features using Golang, GraphQL, TypeScript and React
• Design scalable systems to meet transaction processing requirements
• Implement test automation for the features you build
• Jump between backend, GraphQL and frontend, as needed
• Contribute to our engineering standards, testing practices, and AI driven development
• Work with an agile squad of developers, product, and design
• Ship to production quickly and safely using modern DevOps workflows
• Work on real-world problems (payments, registration, merchandise) at an international scale, ensuring our platform performs seamlessly for millions

What You Bring To The Role

• 4+ years of development experience with modern languages (including exposure to Golang, React and Typescript)
• Experience working in cross-functional product teams, ideally in a startup environment
• Deep knowledge of system design and modern web architecture
• Strong automated testing experience: unit, integration, and end-to-end
• Experience with DevOps, monitoring and performance optimisation
• Ability to write clean, testable, maintainable code aligned with architectural best practices
• Stay current with emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development tools
• Embrace continuous improvement, balancing pragmatism with long-term technical quality
• A growth mindset - you ask questions, seek feedback, and want to improve
• A strong sense of ownership - you take accountability from scoping to delivery

It’s great if you have:

• Experience in payments, payouts and 3rd party integrations in the payment ecosystem
• Hands-on experience with GraphQL (backend and frontend)
• A track record of scaling and monitoring cloud-native services (in AWS)
• Experience in a sporting organisation or sports tech environment, or a love of sport

What You’ll Learn and Grow Into

• How to scale a platform to millions of users without compromising performance
• How to modernise legacy architecture while delivering weekly product value
• How to build inclusive, high-quality experiences across multiple sporting codes
• How to lead technically and culturally in a lean, fast-paced environment
• How to create impact in a business where your work affects real people every weekend

You’ll Love This Role If You…

• Want to work on a platform that powers sport at scale - 500K+ weekly users and growing
• Are energised by building features that scale to millions of users
• Want to see your work ship fast and make a real difference to real communities
• Enjoy navigating trade-offs, solving problems, and owning outcomes
• Love sport (or want to help make it more accessible to everyone)
• Seek mentorship opportunities with senior frontend engineers and architects

Why PlayHQ?

🎯 Impact: Your work will directly improve how millions of people participate in sport globally, supporting the volunteers who make community sports possible.

📈 Growth: Join as they scale globally - they are in 3 countries and 7 sports today, but will double each of those

🏢 Culture: Hybrid working (1-2 days in Melbourne CBD) giving you flexibility while maintaining team connection, wellbeing and lifestyle discounts and Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Paid parental leave, access to on-site refresh studio, and social activities.

🚀 Mission: Be part of unleashing the life-changing power of community sport, making it more accessible and enjoyable for people around the world.

🧑 🎓 L&D: Annual L&D budget to support your growth and team development, Conference attendance and external training opportunities (AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, GopherCon), Technical leadership development programs and mentoring opportunities.

Next Steps

Hi 👋 We’re affix, Talent Acquisition partners of PlayHQ. Ready to help us unleash the life-changing power of community sport? If this sounds interesting to you, then apply! We would love to chat with you.