🌍 Want to Build the Backend Driving the Future of Sustainable Packaging?

As the Founding Backend/Data Engineer, you’ll take on that very responsibility and partner with an A team of 6 world class talents (including you) to solve incredibly complex AI powered challenges at scale.

As you might have guessed, you’ll take full ownership of the backend and data platform, architecting it for massive scale from the ground up, and building it through to production.

You’ll join an early stage startup with both US & European funding, building the software platform that turns complete document and data chaos into blissful clarity.

That data? Packaging data. Stored everywhere - in PDFs, spreadsheets, the PC that was disconnected 3 years ago, the Gmail of the guy that no longer works here - literally everywhere.

And with governments around the world demanding clean, faultless reporting from behemoth conglomerates with a near limitless amount of unstructured, messy data stored practically everywhere you could imagine, they need what you’re building.

Best of all? You’ll help enable better, greener, more sustainable packaging decisions for companies globally. It’s a win for you, your customers, and the planet. What’s not to love!

Sound interesting? Good - let’s read on.

Why This Role Will Change Your Career

• You’ll architect the core. As the founding backend/data engineer, you’ll be the domain specialist in the company, with complete autonomy across that area of the platform.
• You’ll build something that matters. Every workflow you automate helps customers make faster, greener packaging decisions - and hit sustainability targets they couldn’t reach before.
• You’ll work with elite peers. A small, high performing team with deep AI, data, and operational expertise, backed by respected investors across the US and EU.
• You’ll be joining at the start of the J curve. Governments are mandating this work. The alternative is a group of packaging engineers in a room for 3 years doing manual data work. You’re joining a shovel company at the beginning of the gold rush.
• You’ll be rewarded properly. $210k-$250k base plus an early stage level ESOP package that reflects your ownership and impact.

What You’ll Do

You’ll design and own the systems that transform obscene amounts of highly complex, unstructured packaging data into structured intelligence:

• Build ingestion pipelines for files, spreadsheets, PDFs, OCR, and APIs into a canonical packaging schema.
• Define data models and contracts that keep every data point audit-ready and reportable.
• Design and operate batch + event-driven ETL/ELT pipelines with idempotency, retries, and observability built in.
• Architect internal/external APIs and integrations with supplier systems.
• Build reliability and resilience: backpressure, retries, dashboards, and SLAs.
• Drive cost/performance wins across AWS (S3, ECS/EKS, Lambda, IAM, Terraform).
• Partner with AI/ML engineers to add intelligence safely - meaning no hallucinations, only verified data.
• Document, mentor, and set standards for the engineers who’ll eventually follow your lead.

You Might Be Who We’re Looking For If…

• You’re a Staff Engineer who’s built and scaled backend systems and data pipelines in startup or scaleup environments.
• You’re fluent in Python and comfortable in at least one of TypeScript/Node, Go, or Java.
• You’re strong in SQL and data modelling - you understand schema design, versioning, and data contracts.
• You’ve built REST or event-driven APIs and know how to make them reliable and well-documented.
• You understand queues, streams, and workers - and how to make them resilient under load.

About the Mission

Packaging data today is scattered - images, PDFs, supplier portals, spreadsheets, even paper tucked away in a drawer.

Our client is building the AI-powered infrastructure that unifies it all into a single source of truth, automatically - saving customers hundreds of hours in reporting, unlocking grants and rebates, and, most importantly, helping them make better sustainability decisions.

They’re very well funded, building with a Silicon Valley mindset and would love for you to come on board and take ownership of a core part of the product.

What This Is (and Isn’t)

✅ A founding-level role with full ownership of backend/data design and delivery.

✅ Hands-on, high-agency, zero-red-tape environment.

✅ Flexible hybrid setup (Sydney-based; typically 1-2 office days per week).

❌ A pure Data Engineering position. You will do some Data Engineering, but this is a data heavy Backend role that owns everything (including data) across the backend.

❌ It’s not for someone who needs to be given instructions, you’ll be given expected outcomes and full autonomy to achieve them.

❌ A “boring packaging focused role”. This is pushing modern AI and software to its limits at a truly insane scale.

Ready to turn chaos into clarity and positively impact the planet along the way?

If you want to use your engineering talent to accelerate the world’s shift to sustainable packaging - and own the backend and data platform making it possible - we’d love to speak.

Hit apply or reach out to [email protected] for a chat!