Lead Software Engineer - Performance at Deputy – Sydney, Florida

The Role

As a backend Software Engineer - Performance, you are a senior individual contributor responsible for owning and driving the performance, scalability, and cost efficiency of Deputy’s core Workforce Management platform.This role is highly specialised and hands-on.

You will work across core Workforce Management domains — Scheduling, Timesheets, Leave, and Compliance — identifying performance bottlenecks, legacy constraints, and architectural inefficiencies, then leading initiatives end-to-end to address them.

You will operate with a high degree of autonomy, forming and leading performance-focused initiatives that often run without direct product direction. You will define the problem, shape the technical approach, break work into deliverable milestones, and drive execution through collaboration and influence rather than line management.

Your work will directly impact mid-market and enterprise customers operating at scale, supporting high-volume workloads across multiple regions and time zones, and ensuring the platform continues to perform reliably as data volumes, customer complexity, and usage grow.

• 6+ years of professional software development experience, including operating production systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience across multiple Workforce Management domains, such as Scheduling, Rostering, Timesheets, Leave, and Compliance.
• Strong product and domain understanding of Workforce Management, including the operational and compliance complexity faced by mid-market and enterprise customers.

• Proven experience leading and delivering performance optimisation initiatives across complex systems.
• Strong expertise in SQL query optimisation, including execution plans, indexing strategies, and tuning for high-volume workloads.
• Extensive experience designing and operating caching strategies, including cache invalidation and consistency trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch at scale, including index design, query optimisation, ingestion pipelines, and cost/performance trade-offs.

• Proven experience working with legacy systems and modern platforms, including planning and executing migrations from legacy architectures to modern solutions.
• Experience evolving performance-critical paths from monolithic or tightly coupled systems into more maintainable, scalable implementations.
• Strong backend engineering skills, with experience in PHP and Go highly advantageous.
• Experience designing and operating APIs (REST, RPC) and distributed systems using modern cloud infrastructure and tooling.

• Comfortable operating as a senior individual contributor with broad influence and ownership, without direct reports.
• Ability to lead through technical credibility, collaboration, and pragmatic decision-making.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex performance and architectural trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A pragmatic problem solver with a strong bias toward measurable improvement, system health, and continuous learning.