Lead Software Engineer - Performance

Deputy is a global SaaS workforce management company with hubs in Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco and London, plus team members working remotely across the United States. Our platform serves over 1.5 million workers and 375,000 workplaces across 100+ countries. We are backed by top global investors and recently achieved Unicorn status.    At Deputy, we’re improving the world of work, one shift at a time, for 80% of the world’s workforce: hourly workers. These are the dedicated employees who keep our world running – from baristas to nurses, cleaners to delivery drivers, florists to factory workers. Despite their vital role in society, most workplace technology has focused on those workers who sit behind a desk, but at Deputy, we transform the frontline. When businesses use Deputy, their workplaces thrive – the business is more profitable, compliant, and productive, while the workers are more engaged and happier at work.   We're becoming an AI-native company, a commitment that means you'll be empowered (and expected) to use AI tools and thinking in your day-to-day work. You'll have the training, support, and freedom to use AI responsibly and creatively to spark ideas, solve problems faster, and unlock new ways of working.   If you’re passionate about creating solutions that put people first and helping businesses and their teams thrive, join us at Deputy and make an impact where it matters most! 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. Responsibilities Skills & Experience

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, will be highly regarded.

Product and domain understanding of Workforce Management, including the operational and compliance complexity faced by mid-market and enterprise customers, will be highly regarded.

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.