Senior Software Engineer

🌏 Help Support the World's Biggest Social Justice Movements

Chuffed.org is a global crowdfunding platform powering the world's biggest social justice movements. We've helped raise over $250M across 50,000 campaigns in 23 countries and we're just getting started.

In the last year we've grown 3x and become the go-to platform for activists and organisations in two of the biggest social justice movements of our times: Palestine and climate justice.

We're now hiring a Senior Software Engineer to expand our team and help us build and scale a platform that powers thousands of purpose-driven campaigns, while shaping the technical foundations that will support our next phase of growth.

The Role

Join us as a Senior Software Engineer, becoming a vital part of a close-knit trio alongside our Tech Lead and another Senior Engineer, collectively owning and driving the entire platform. This position leans heavily into backend development: you’ll dive deep into enhancing our Laravel and MariaDB systems, prioritizing performance and security at every step. When needed, you’ll also contribute to our React and Next.js frontend to support product initiatives.

With such a lean team, you’ll enjoy genuine ownership. Your influence will shape architectural decisions, establish best practices, and directly impact how Chuffed scales and thrives as we move forward.

At Chuffed, here’s what a typical day looks like for you:

• Own key backend components, including APIs, data models, and the critical systems that securely and reliably move funds to campaigner
• Lead efforts to strengthen and speed up the platform through targeted security enhancements, query optimization, indexing, and reducing risks in vital processes
• Jump into frontend development with React and Next.js when necessary, collaborating closely with our Tech Lead on cross-cutting architectural decisions and platform-wide initiatives
• Spot genuine technical debt and bottlenecks slowing us down, delivering practical and impactful improvements; not chasing perfection, but the right solutions
• Work hand-in-hand with our support and campaign teams to address real user issues swiftly, feeding these insights back into shaping our roadmap
• Help define how a small team of senior engineers collaborates effectively by establishing documentation standards, review practices, and guiding the evolution of our codebase patterns

How We Work

• Small and senior. Our three-person engineering team thrives on trust, autonomy, and cutting through noise, ensuring your contributions truly make a difference
• Modern dev tooling, including AI. We are integrating AI-powered coding tools as a part of our daily workflow and warmly welcome engineers who share this approach
• Mission-driven work, every day. Your efforts will empower people running campaigns that genuinely matter - covering vital causes like climate, justice, and community organizing, which are all reflected in how we build and innovate.

Requirements

• 5+ years building production software, with several at a senior level. You've owned services end-to-end and you're comfortable being the person other engineers ask for a sanity check
• Strong backend fundamentals. You know your way around relational databases (MariaDB, MySQL, Postgres - pick your poison), can reason about query performance and schema trade-offs, and have shipped APIs that hold up under real load
• Strong expertise in PHP/Laravel. You bring several years of hands-on experience with PHP/Laravel or possess a solid background that seamlessly translates into this dynamic field.
• A track record of working on performance and security. You've made systems faster and safer, and you can talk concretely about how
• You're comfortable across the stack. Backend is your home, but you can get useful work done in a React/Next.js codebase without hand-holding
• You communicate well with non-engineers. Our team includes campaigners, marketers, and support folks. You can explain technical trade-offs to them clearly and you actually listen to what they're flagging
• You're a pragmatic decision-maker who handles ambiguity well. You can move forward without a perfect spec, know when "good enough" is the right call, and know when to escalate

Bonus points

• Experience with our infrastructure (AWS, Terraform)
• Background in payments, fintech, or other systems where reliability and trust are non-negotiable
• Experience with GraphQL
• You've worked at a similarly small team and know what good looks like when there's no one to delegate to

Benefits

• $170,000 salary + super
• We value work-life balance. We work autonomously from home and meet up with the team intermittently to collaborate in-person. We're based in Sydney and Melbourne, but open to remote employees within Australia
• Work alongside industry leading marketers and digital engineers in a small and agile team with deep industry connections
• Spend your days amplifying the work of campaigners pushing for progressive social change around the world

Chuffed is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We strongly encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, ages, and experiences. If this role excites you and you can see yourself doing the work, please apply, even if your background doesn't tick every box.