Backend Engineer - Data Engineering Team

Work with cutting edge technology, making the world a safer and more secure place. DroneShield (ASX:DRO) offers an opportunity to solve some of world’s most challenging technical problems in the Electronic Warfare, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, RF sensing, Sensor Fusion and distributed systems. Working with high profile customers across militaries, government agencies, airports, critical infrastructure, law enforcement and many others.

With one of the largest listed defence company market capitalisations in Australia and having raised approximately $250m in 2024 alone, DroneShield is undergoing hypergrowth stage, fuelled by rapidly increasing use of drones for nefarious applications, from battlefield, to terrorism, to contraband delivery and commercial espionage.

This role is in the DroneShield Sydney headquarters in Pyrmont, Sydney. There are approximately 290 staff based in the 4,000sqm facility today, scheduled to grow to approximately 350 staff by end of 2026. Overseas on the ground presence includes Virginia (USA), Denmark, Germany and Dubai, as well as distributors in over 70 countries globally.

About the role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join our Data Engineering team. The team is passionately focused on helping our internal customers, particularly our machine learning and AI teams, interface with our rich data services using robust and performant APIs and data pipelines.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations 

• Build new features and capabilities daily in a complex AI microservices and MLOps environment
• Collaborate with other engineers and designers between AI, frontend, backend
• Write and review code with best practices of readability, testing patterns, documentation, reliability, security, and performance considerations in mind
• Drive strong outcomes around test driven development to enhance API product quality and performance
• Own an Agile development mindset, appreciating the benefit of constant improvement, and participating in rituals such as daily stand-ups, sprint planning, team retrospectives, backlog grooming
• Ensure software is designed for reliability, and performance on resource constrained targets
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to team members
• Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to deliver on user and business requirements

Qualifications, Experience and Skills 

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years building production backend and API led applications
• Proficiency in web-based applications and architecture, crafting and implementing highly scalable and performant REST micro-services, gRPC experience is a plus
• Expertise in developing performant production quality backend services in Go and/or Python (Django and/or FastAPI)
• Experience using Docker and Kubernetes to deploy applications
• Experience building, deploying and maintaining applications in a modern software development environment
• Broad knowledge and understanding of micro-service architectures with basic hands-on experience operating in Linux environments
• Demonstrated experience in API design, including requirements gathering, versioning, security, extensibility, error handling, testing and documentation
• Familiarity with quality API and backend architecture patterns
• Demonstrated passion for collaboration and strong interpersonal and communication skills

Desirable Skills 

• Experience working closely with ambiguous and complex customer requirements, being able to navigate uncertainty, to develop high quality and innovative solutions
• Experience working in API development in a medium-large scale SaaS organisation
• Application development with cross-cutting concerns (logging, persistence, security, configuration management, transactional behaviour)
• Development tools including Git, Jira, Confluence, CICD
• Experience with machine learning model development, lifecycle and MLOps
• Experience developing data intensive web applications
• Comfortable on the command line in a Linux first environment

Note for recruitment agencies: We do not accept unsolicited candidates from external recruiters unless specifically instructed.