Staff Engineer

Join us on our mission to make a better world of work. Culture Amp is the world’s leading employee experience platform, revolutionizing how 25 million employees across more than 6,500 companies create a better world of work. Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform employee engagement, drive performance management, and develop high‑performing teams. Powered by people science and the most comprehensive employee dataset in the world, the most innovative companies including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq depend on Culture Amp every day. Culture Amp is backed by leading venture capital funds and has offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Culture Amp has been recognized as one of the world’s top private cloud companies by Forbes and most innovative companies by Fast Company. How you can help make a better world of work As a Staff Engineer (L4) for the 1‑on‑1s team, you'll drive the technical heart of a product that helps employees and managers connect, thrive, and grow. You’ll shape backend architecture and implementation for a recent Ruby/Rails rebuild, focusing on database‑forward design and real performance gains. Working from a baseline of a clean codebase and green metrics, you’ll support crucial integrations (Kafka, Temporal, AWS) that enable modern data and event streaming. By mentoring team members and proactively building system resilience, your work will make our platform even more reliable, allowing our customers to do their best work with confidence. Responsibilities Be the primary backend specialist for the 1‑on‑1s team, with ownership of architecture, implementation, and performance in Ruby/Rails and PostgreSQL on AWS infrastructure. Drive technical excellence through optimised database design and robust backend engineering. Maintain and enhance integrations for event streaming and data pipelines, including Kafka and Temporal. Mentor junior engineers, sharing knowledge and empowering growth across the team. Play a proactive on‑call role, building reliable systems and minimising incidents. Collaborate across teams, supporting product secondments while maintaining our core remit. You have Advanced skills in backend engineering, especially using Ruby/Rails and PostgreSQL. Experience with authentication/authorisation, event/data streaming, SRE, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure. A track record of delivering clean, maintainable code and driving architectural decisions. Familiarity with comparable stacks (RabbitMQ, etc.), with a willingness to adapt and learn. You are Collaborative, communicative, and passionate about mentoring others. Accountable and resilient, thriving in changing priorities and on‑call environments. Committed to the philosophy of “Choose Boring Tech, Keep It Simple,” valuing long‑term stability over novelty. Proactive in engaging diverse stakeholders and supporting a positive team culture. Benefits Employee Share Options Program: We empower you to be an owner in Culture Amp and share in our success. Programs, coaching, and budgets to help you thrive personally and professionally. Access to external providers for mental wellbeing and coaching support to sustain the wellbeing, safety and development of our people. Monthly Camper Life Allowance: An automatic allowance paid out each month with your pay – you can spend it however you like to improve your experience and life outside work. Team budgets dedicated to team building activities and connection. Intentional quarterly wellbeing pauses: A quarterly company‑wide shutdown day in each region to collectively pause, reset and focus on restoration and rest, without having to tap into individual vacation time. Extended year‑end breaks: An extended refresh period at the end of year. Excellent parental leave and in‑work support program available from day 1 of joining Culture Amp. 5 Social Impact Days a year to make a positive impact on the community outside of work. MacBooks for you to do your best & a work‑from‑home office budget to spend on setting up your home office. Medical insurance coverage for you and your family (available for US & UK only). Additionally, we don’t just focus on our internal community; we believe in creating a better world of work for all. We’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, with Employee Resource Groups and ally communities in place. We have a strong commitment to Anti‑Racism, and endeavour to lead by example. Every step we make as a business towards anti‑racism is another step we can take to support our customers in making a better world (of work). You can see our current commitments to Anti‑Racism here. Please keep reading… Research shows that candidates from under‑represented backgrounds often don’t apply for roles if they don’t meet all the criteria – unlike majority candidates meeting significantly fewer requirements. We strongly encourage you to apply if you’re interested: we'd love to know how you can amplify our team with your unique experience If you decide to apply, as part of your application, we will ask you to complete voluntary diversity questions (excluding roles in Germany). These questions are completely optional, but your participation truly helps. By sharing this anonymous information, you support our efforts to build a more inclusive and equitable hiring process—and help us hold ourselves accountable to that commitment. Your responses are entirely confidential and will not impact hiring decisions. If you require reasonable accommodations or adjustments due to a disability to complete the online application or to participate in the interview process, please contact and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly. Culture Amp will retain your CV & personal information for a period of two years (four years for the US) from the date of your application process completion. Culture Amp may contact you in relation to future job opportunities during this time period. For further information please see our privacy policy here or contact Culture Amp is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment regardless of race, colour, religion, creed, age, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, military or veteran status, or any other category protected by federal, state, or local law. Thank you and good luck with your application. Location: Melbourne or Sydney, Australia #J-18808-Ljbffr