Staff Product Engineer

Construction is one of the world's most important industries, and one of the most underserved by software. We're building the operating system for construction, bringing together the information and tools builders need to run their business. Come help us let builders build.

Melbourne, hybrid and flexible - the team generally works 3 days/week in our Richmond office

Why BuildPass?

Builders spend too much time working around spreadsheets, PDFs and paper. BuildPass brings estimating, finance, scheduling, safety and site management into one platform, from the first estimate to the final payment.

We're building a trusted record of a construction business: its people, projects, costs and what's happening on site. Connecting that information gives AI the context to help with the work itself. An assistant could help a site manager find the right information, prepare paperwork using project records, or flag something that needs attention before it holds up a job.

Today BuildPass powers:

• 1,000+ head contractors, 100,000+ subcontractors and 500,000+ field workers across Australia, US, Canada, and NZ
• 3.2M+ site sign-ons, 1.5M+ forms, 140k+ drawings and defects logged on real jobs
• An AI layer that works on a builder's live data - agents, MCP and multi-modal assistants - from the finances to the office to the field

The opportunity is to build AI that understands the business it's working in and can take useful action within it. That means solving interesting engineering problems around context, permissions and reliability, with a direct connection to how people use the product every day.

You'll be part of a broader product and engineering team working across the core platform, AI agents and the experience on site. You'll help connect that work, shaping foundations that make new capabilities useful across a builder's business. There's room to influence the direction, build alongside experienced people, and see your work reach customers. Read the BuildPass method.

The role

As a Staff Product Engineer, you'll help set our technical direction while building alongside the team. You'll lead work that crosses product boundaries, make decisions other engineers can build on, and help the people around you take on more ambitious problems.

We work in short cycles, getting useful improvements into customers' hands each week. Your scope will also include the deeper work behind those improvements: reliable AI behaviour, shared platform capabilities, and patterns that make the whole team more effective.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You'll have room to influence decisions across product and engineering, with experienced peers to work through them with. We value technical judgement, curiosity and care for the customer, and welcome engineers who bring depth in an area while continuing to grow across the stack.

We're close to our customers, and what we learn from them shapes what we build. Priorities can change as new needs emerge. You'll help us connect that immediate feedback to the bigger opportunities, solving recurring problems at the source and building foundations that support the next stage of the product.

Examples of what you'll work on

• BuildPass Agent. Turn a builder’s live data like jobs, costs, schedules and site records into an agent that works safely: tools, context, permissions, and knowing when to ask a human.
• Trust in AI output. Build evaluations, feedback loops and observability so we can understand how AI features perform and improve them as customers use them.
• The platform under the product. Shared data models, APIs, permissions and integrations that let every engineer ship across estimating, finance, scheduling and safety without the product fragmenting.
• New product surfaces, going beyond web apps. Multi-modal agents, MCPs, assistants you can text and call, offline apps - better ways for builders to get work done wherever they are.
• How we build. Improve our tools, conventions and internal agents, turning useful approaches into patterns the rest of the team can adopt.

We keep our stack lean, centred on TypeScript from frontend to backend. We encourage engineers to work across the full stack and have built shared patterns to support that, making it easier to take a customer problem through to a working product.

AI is part of our everyday development workflow, and you'll help shape how we use it well. We share technical decisions in writing, work through trade-offs together, and improve our approach as we learn.

We protect time for building and deep focus, with room to bring others into a problem when you need context or a sounding board.

You'll thrive here if you…

• Own outcomes end to end. You take a vague, high-stakes problem and turn it into a clear path forward for our customers. You know when a prototype is warranted, make the tradeoffs, keep the team in the loop, and ship to a high bar. You've done this for a whole product area or system, with results you can point to.
• Go to the customer. Support threads, calls, feedback and usage data - you stay close, and you bring other engineers with you. Usually that's a site manager on a phone in the ute between site walks. You dig past the request to the root cause.
• Sweat the details. You care how software feels, and take pride in knowing it's good.
• Match speed to the stakes. You know how to test an idea quickly and how to build for the reliability a payment claim or safety record requires.
• Work with the grain. You learn why the codebase is the way it is before changing it, and pay down the debt that's actually slowing us down. You bring depth in an area and are comfortable learning and contributing across the stack.
• Make the call, write it down, push back. You make technical decisions clear in writing, welcome challenge, and help others develop their thinking. You're comfortable questioning an approach and working with the team to find a better one.
• Lift the people around you. You share what works, build tools and skills others use, and unblock gnarly product gaps. Your patterns outlive the PR.
• Reach for AI first. You use AI throughout your engineering workflow and apply your own judgement to the result. Experience shipping LLM features to customers is a bonus.

No degree, big-name employer or minimum years required. We care more about instincts and evidence: what you've owned, and what changed because of you.

What we'd love to see

• Something significant you've built or led - a demo or write-up covering the problem, the tradeoffs, what you'd change now, and what happened to the team and product as a result.
• Deep experience with a modern web stack (ideally TypeScript, React, and a Node backend) and solid data modelling.
• Bonus: experience in B2B SaaS with complex workflows, permissions or multi-tenant data; startup or founder experience; time in construction, field services or other industries software forgot.

This role may not suit you if

• You're looking for a people-management role or want to move away from hands-on engineering.
• You prefer a role focused exclusively on frontend or backend.
• You prefer to work from fully defined specifications and a fixed roadmap.

What we offer

• Competitive salary, with the opportunity for equity
• Opportunities to visit and work in Austin, Texas as needed
• A small, experienced team where you can influence technical direction, work through ambitious problems with your peers, and see your decisions reach customers quickly
• A generous budget for AI tools and models, with the freedom to choose what helps you do your best work and explore better ways of building

How we hire

We want to understand how you think, build and work with people. The process centres on your work and a practical challenge, and we can adapt the format to help you do your best work.

• First conversation (60 min)

  Meet Kina (Product Lead) and James (Engineering Manager). Bring something you've built and walk us through it: the problem, the tradeoffs, the decisions, what you learned.

• A challenge

  Choose a take-home exercise or a co-working session with us. We'll explain the exercise and how we'd like you to use AI before you begin, so you know what to expect.

• Final chat with Aaron (45 min)

  Our cofounder and CTO, on motivation, values, how you work and why BuildPass.

Location & other details

This role is based in Melbourne, with hybrid working from our Richmond office and opportunities to visit and work in Austin, Texas as needed. The team generally spends three days a week together in the office, with flexibility in how we arrange that. We aren't offering visa sponsorship for this role at this time.