Position: Principal Software Engineer

Date: March 2026

Department: Engineering

Reports to: Head of Engineering

Employment Type: Full-time

Location: Melbourne

Workplace Type: Hybrid, 3 days per week in the office (Tue-Thur). WFH Mondays | Fridays

Who we are

Rosterfy is a global leading, end-to-end enterprise volunteer engagement platform powering over 100 million volunteer hours. We exist to connect communities to events and causes they are passionate about.

Used by over 3 million volunteers across 26 different countries, Our SaaS platform powers mass volunteer programs across the globe for Not-for-Profits, local government, sporting federations, and major events. Our all in one solution helps our clients to recruit, retain, reward and train their volunteers, whilst also ensuring compliance.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, with offices in Sydney, London, Dallas, Denver & New York, our vibrant, inclusive and passionate global team is driven to unite the world around volunteering.

Why you want to work with us

🚀 Rapid Growth: Rosterfy is a rapidly expanding company, doubling in size every year. Backed by top investors, Rosterfy is on a rocket ship trajectory, set for incredible growth and success.

🌏 Global Impact: We are reshaping volunteering globally and have an ambitious goal to redefine what it means to be a volunteer. Work with us, and be certain that you will make an impact.

❤️ Well-liked: with 4.5 stars on Capterra, 4.4 stars on G2, and winners of various awards, we are well liked by clients and recognised for our exceptional service and innovative solutions.

🏆 Awesome clients: We've been the volunteer management platform for 7 consecutive Super Bowls, Lifeline, & Oxfam amongst many other happy clients across 26 countries.

💸 Competitive salary: We offer a competitive salary commensurate with experience and qualifications, along with comprehensive benefits.

Check out our Employee Value Proposition slide deck here! https://www.rosterfy.com/hubfs/Rosterfy%20EVP%20Deck.pdf

About The Role:

As a Principal Software Engineer at Rosterfy, you are the most senior individual contributor in the engineering team, responsible for setting technical direction while staying deeply hands-on. You work across our two product squads as a force multiplier: designing architecture, pairing on hard problems, and unblocking delivery on critical initiatives. Reporting to the HoE, you connect product strategy to implementation detail, ensuring Rosterfy v3 (event-driven, domain-driven, AI-augmented) is robust, scalable, and maintainable across our PHP/Laravel backend, Next.js frontend, and AWS/GCP infrastructure.

You spend a significant portion of your time building (coding, reviewing, debugging, pairing) while also shaping engineering standards, architecture, and long-term platform evolution. You do not manage people directly; instead, you lead through technical excellence, influence, and mentoring.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the architecture and technical direction for core platform domains used by both squads (e.g. event-driven workflows, modular boundaries, AI capabilities).
• Spend 60–80% of your time hands-on: designing, coding, reviewing, pairing, and debugging in Laravel, Next.js and our cloud environments.
• Lead the technical discovery and delivery of high-impact initiatives, especially those that cross team boundaries or require significant architectural change.
• Define, document, and evangelize architectural principles, coding standards, and patterns for scalable, resilient, observable systems.
• Raise the bar for quality: champion shift-left testing, CI/CD improvements, and production observability; model best practices in test design and validation.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and feedback, helping them own systems end-to-end rather than taking work away.
• Evaluate and prototype emerging technologies (e.g. Vertex AI, GenAI workflows, data pipelines) and guide pragmatic adoption into product and platform.
• Act as a senior engineering voice in roadmap planning, estimation and trade-off decisions, ensuring technical health is represented alongside product goals
• Works across both product squads rather than being embedded in one team, focusing on cross-cutting systems and the hardest technical problems.
• Partners with the Engineering Leadership on long-term architecture and with Tech Leads on execution and engineering practices.

Key Requirements:

• 8+ years in software engineering, including experience as a staff/principal engineer or architect in a SaaS company
• Deep expertise in backend engineering with Laravel (Laravel 10+ and PHP 8+) or similar languages, SQL/relational databases, caching, and RESTful APIs
• Strong frontend design and architectural experience with React/Next.js
• Experience working with scalable, secure cloud infrastructure (AWS required, & CGP)
• Familiarity with event-driven or modular architectures and containerized environments (e.g., EKS/Kubernetes)
• Deep understanding of software testing strategies and CI/CD pipelines
• Bonus: experience with Looker, BigQuery, ML pipelines, or distributed system performance tuning
• Bonus: Agent AI Architecture

Nice to have:

• Experience with data products like Looker, BigQuery, or analytics pipelines
• Exposure to event-driven systems, asynchronous workflows, or message queues (e.g. AWS SQS, Kafka, Pub/Sub)
• Experience with design systems | frontend architecture
• Passionate about product quality and customer experience
• Experience with platform engineering or building shared infrastructure in modular monoliths
• Any exposure to AI driven tooling, systems

Remuneration and Benefits Package

• Competitive salary offering
• Paid time off to participate in volunteering activities
• Referral bonuses and recognition programs

EEO Statement:

Rosterfy is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We know that underrepresented groups — including women and people from marginalized backgrounds — are less likely to apply unless they meet every requirement. If you’re excited about a role but don’t tick every box, we encourage you to apply anyway. We’re all about potential, growth, and finding the right people to join us on our mission.