Staff Software Engineer

About this role

Dovetail is the Customer Intelligence Platform for the entire organization. We unify fragmented feedback from every touchpoint, including sales calls, support tickets, and research, into a single AI-powered intelligence layer that empowers every team to build, sell, and serve with confidence. Founded in 2017, we are a team of 100+ across our offices in Sydney and San Francisco, working with thousands of teams from Fortune 500 companies to the world’s most innovative startups. The best never guess. We help teams turn the noise of thousands of customer interactions into the signal required to move faster, prioritize better, and drive revenue. THE ROLE As a Staff Engineer at Dovetail, you operate as a force multiplier. Your impact is measured less by the code you write alone and more by the technical direction you set, the hard problems you unblock, and the engineers you make better around you. You'll take on our most ambiguous, highest-leverage problems, the ones that cross team boundaries and don't have an obvious owner. You'll set architectural direction for systems that process unstructured customer data at scale, and you'll make the calls that shape how we build for the next stage of growth. This is an in person-first role (4 days a week), working from our Surry Hills HQ. WHAT YOU'LL DO HERE - Set technical direction across your team, making architecture and design decisions that balance speed today against scale tomorrow. - Drive complex, cross-functional projects from ambiguity to shipped, working closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to create delightful experiences for our customers. - Raise the engineering bar through code review, system design, technical standards, and the kind of mentorship that levels up everyone around you. - Own the reliability, performance, and security of systems handling enterprise-grade customer data. Identify the technical work that matters most and make the case for it, then do the thing. - You'll maintain and foster a pragmatic approach to software development, while also collaborating to establish detailed guidelines and standards for product development processes based on industry best practices and your experience. YOUR BACKGROUND - Extensive experience building web products. You'll have hands-on exposure building full-stack web applications, including frontend websites and backend services with technologies like TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Node, PostgreSQL on top of cloud vendors like AWS and GCP. Previous experience with an object-oriented programming language, such as C++, Java, Python, etc. is essential for this role. - Experience managing software projects. You'll have the ability to own the delivery of complex features, break down requirements, and provide reasonable estimates. - A passion for innovation and learning. We’re an AI native business. We build products using AI and ML-based technologies like Bedrock and the best models from Anthropic, Google and Amazon. You architect and ship AI-native product features, from semantic clustering and theme detection to agentic workflows, with a real grasp of the production tradeoffs around latency, cost, evaluation, and reliability. You also use AI to multiply your own output and push your teams to do the same, - You are pragmatic and flexible. Like your new teammates, you're used to doing what's necessary to get the job done. You'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, be resourceful to solve problems, and be able to adjust to shifting deadlines and project goals. - When you do it, you nail it. You share our keen eye for quality. You don't half-ass your work; instead, what you ship is top-notch. You cut scope before cutting quality. - Excellent, concise communicator. You can easily convey your thoughts, opinions, and feelings with your product team and have the ability to strongly articulate effort vs impact tradeoffs. WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT HERE We hire smart people and look after them well! Here's the deal: 📈 Equity for everyone. Competitive base salary plus options, so every builder is aligned on long-term impact. 🏢 A place to do your best work, wherever you are. Our Sydney office is built for in-person first collaboration. Our US team runs on a flexible remote setup. Either way, you've got what you need. 🤝 Built in connection. Join a Doveclub, bond with your team regularly, and celebrate the small wins, big milestones, and cultural moments with the whole company. 📚 Learn and thrive. Flexible L&D and wellness benefits, choose between a generous $3000 L&D allowance, or up to $1000 on wellness. 🌴 Time to recharge. Four weeks of accrued leave, floating public holidays, and gifted bonus Kit Kat days sprinkled throughout the year. 🌍 Four weeks from anywhere. Up to four weeks a year doing your job from anywhere in the world. Split it up or use it all at once. 🍼 Generous parental leave. We offer 20 weeks for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers, plus return-to-work support. 🎉 Four weeks at four years. Four years is a long time in tech, and we value loyalty. Take an additional four weeks off to reset and recharge. 🩺 Stellar US benefits. Comprehensive health, dental, vision, 401(k), and more through Sequoia. At Dovetail, we're building a place where every team member feels supported and valued. We celebrate individualism and want you to show up as your authentic self every day. It’s no secret that diversity builds the best teams, large or small, so we highly encourage applications from people who identify as part of an underrepresented group. On AI: We expect candidates to already be embedding AI into their day-to-day work. We look for people who are thoughtful and pragmatic in how they use AI—knowing when to leverage it, how to direct it effectively, and how to apply it to improve the quality, speed, and impact of their work.