Senior Platform Engineer

Young people all over the world deserve a world-class science education. Stile is on a mission to ensure that students are able to critically evaluate what they see in their social media feeds, and feel confident using science and technology to solve the big issues of tomorrow. We expect Stile to become one of the biggest and most influential K-12 SaaS platforms in the world.

Every week over 250,000 students and their teachers use Stile’s web platform to explore and analyse the science behind the big issues facing us globally. Our platform is designed and used for teachers and students to use collaboratively in class. Stile is used in 1 in 3 Australian secondary schools, with around 45% of year 7-10 students subscribed. This will grow by more than 10x over the next two years as we expand internationally. That’s quite some reach, and it’s a responsibility we take extremely seriously. When you join our small team, you have a unique opportunity to have a massive impact on the future of science education. 

We need your help! 

We're a small, high-performing, diverse, tight-knit team with a mission to radically improve mainstream science and maths education at schools. We’re looking for exceptional engineers who want to solve interesting problems alongside other brilliant people. 

Our Platform Team is the backbone of Stile. We own reliability, security, performance, cost optimisation, and safe, rapid delivery of our platform. With Terraform, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and auto-scaling infrastructure, running Stile is (almost) a hands-free experience.

We’re scaling from 500K to 5M subscribed students over the next two years, and we need your help to get it right!

As a Platform Engineer, you won't just keep systems running, you’ll design, architect, and deliver solutions that multiply our impact. You will shape how Stile grows, scales, and thrives globally. As a Platform Team member you will first and foremost be a great software engineer. You'll be charged with architecting and delivering robust software to automate and scale solutions for many different problems across the team's various responsibilities.

What you’ll do

• Own critical infrastructure: Build resilient, scalable systems that handle traffic from millions of students every day.
• Drive automation: Create tools that empower all Stile engineers to ship features safely and rapidly.
• Lead with expertise: Bring deep infrastructure knowledge and engineering craft to solve complex challenges with clarity.
• Elevate the team: Mentor peers, set high standards, and help shape engineering culture.
• Stay close to impact: See your work used by students the very next day.

If you enjoy building tools that improve science education globally, rather than just pulling another ticket off the backlog, then this is the job for you!

Why you’ll love it here

We set engineers up to do their best work:

• High standards, great tooling, and a culture of “build it right.”
• A highly-motivated and talented team with experienced engineers, and passionate new starters.
• Modern stack: AWS, Terraform, Rust for tooling, Ruby/Sorbet APIs, React + TypeScript frontend.
• Strong mentorship, training budgets, and real career pathways.
• A near-continuous release cadence with genuine engineer input in design
• A culture of asking ‘how should this work?’ rather than ‘what's easiest?’
• Quality over quantity: we're pragmatists, but we already have an established business that's here for the long term, so maintenance matters more than up-front build time. We'd rather build it right than live with something broken.
• Huge reach: when you ship, hundreds of thousands of students will see it right away.
• Work-life balance that’s real, not lip service: flexible hours, generous leave, and parental policies.
• A genuine commitment to the professional development of each engineer through training, coaching, mentorship opportunities, regular feedback and increasing responsibility.
• Leadership that gets it: Stile was founded and is led by engineers. Great engineering is noticed – and rewarded.
• The best of both worlds: Operate in a nimble, independent organisation, while drawing on specialist skills, tools, and big-company subscriptions from our larger parent organisation.
• Global opportunities: Work from our offices in Brooklyn, Portland, Boston, Dublin, Bangalore and beyond, or explore secondments into global teams.

About you 

You’re not just a great engineer, you’re a systems thinker and team player. You:

• Balance pragmatism with ambition: ship value, but build for the long-term.
• Think beyond code: about processes, people, and how teams work best.
• Love mentoring, collaborating, and raising others up.
• Thrive with autonomy but know when to lean on your team.
• You're a critical thinker who sees the system as a whole, and finds ways to cut to the core of the issue.
• May not know our stack yet, but you learn fast and love a challenge.
• Know that sometimes "more tech" isn't the answer. You love thinking about people, processes, and systems for continuous improvement, and use a balance of technology and people skills to have a huge impact
• Know there will never be enough time to do everything. You think about the value of competing projects and priorities, and enjoy finding the balance between things that are urgent today, and things that will set us up for success in the longer term

Life at Stile

We’re here to build something real and enduring. A company that in years to come we look back on and are proud of what we achieved, and how we achieved it. 

So, what’s it like working with us? 

• Colleagues worth working with.
  You’ll join an amazing 70-strong team of teachers, scientists, artists, and engineers.  We hold ourselves, and each other, to a high standard, and love what we do.
• Work on something that really matters.   
  In partnership with teachers, we’re coaching students to become problem solvers and critical thinkers. We believe that with a strong command of science, tomorrow’s citizens and leaders are set up to sort the misinformation from the facts.
• Support always.   
  Stile is its people, and it’s important we are creating an environment where you’re supported, happy and able to do your best work. We have strong management and feedback frameworks, and a great benefits program check it out here Stile benefits  
• A fantastic office environment.   
  When we can, we spend time in the office. It has a huge central kitchen, lots of places to put your feet up to work and even end of trip facilities if you ride in.  
• Flexibility.   
  We expect that you work hard, but you’ll have flexible hours and you’re the master of your own schedule.
• Your own professional development.   
  We’re lifelong learners here at Stile. Alongside teaching you everything you need to know to succeed in this role, we provide a generous PD allowance. 

Hours and location

Our head office is located in the ‘Paris end’ of Melbourne CBD. Typically, people come to the office a few days per week to spend in person time with their teammates, then a few days at home focusing on GSD with minimal distractions. Overall we’re an “in-person” culture (we enjoy working together face to face), but we’re also flexible with a mix of working from home and the office, once you settle in.

On call

All Platform Engineers share responsibility for keeping Stile running smoothly, but we’ve designed our on-call system to be fair and sustainable.

• Each engineer typically takes a two-week rotation about twice per quarter (once as primary, once as backup).
• After-hours incidents are rare, thanks to solid infrastructure and proactive monitoring. We’re building out a follow-the-sun rotation staffed in both Australia and the US with the goal of driving the number of out of hours interruptions down from a few per year, to near-zero
• To recognise the commitment, on-call engineers receive an extra week of annual leave each year, plus time-in-lieu if meaningful work happens outside normal hours.

Sound interesting?

Great! We want to know more about you, so click apply, and provide the following to show you’re great at following the details.    

• A cover letter addressed to Daniel Rodgers-Pryor (no more than a page) explaining why you would smash an engineering role at Stile out of the park. Include a paragraph on which Behaviours of an Effective Stile-ist (https://stileeducation.com/au/who-we-are/effective-stilists/) most resonate with you or which you disagree with and why.
• Your resume.

Got questions about our hiring process? You can find the answers here: https://stileeducation.com/au/who-we-are/hiring-process. We can't wait to hear from you!