Senior Software Engineer Full Stack Developer

Salary: $150,000 – $170,000 per year

Senior Software Engineer (AI-Driven Development)

6-MONTH FIXED-TERM CONTRACT — FIRST IN-HOUSE ENGINEER
QIS Packaging — Brisbane | Full-time hours | Hybrid (office + work from home)

Please read this before applying. Two things define this role, and both are unusual:

1. It is a 6-month fixed-term contract. Not permanent — though there is a genuine opportunity to extend past six months for the right person.

2. You would be our first in-house engineer. There is no existing development team. No tech lead above you. No one who has done this job here before you. For six months, you are the engineering function at QIS Packaging.

If either of those is the wrong shape for you, we'd genuinely rather you found out here than at interview.

The deal, upfront

• 6-month fixed-term contract. Full-time hours, with a defined end date. There's a real path to extending beyond six months for the right person — but six months is what we're hiring for and what we're committing to, and we won't dress it up as anything else.

• First engineer in the business. You own the engineering function outright for the term, reporting directly to the business owner.

• You'll work solo, but not alone. You're the only engineer — but you'll work shoulder to shoulder with sales, purchasing, warehouse, accounts and the owner every week. They're the people the system is for, and you'll be in the room with them.

• Agentic is the method, not a bonus. Directing AI agents is how the work gets done here. This is a requirement of the role, not a nice-to-have — see below.

• Systems and efficiencies. You take it from partial build to the system that runs the company.

• At the end of six months: an extension or a permanent offer is possible if the work lands and the business case holds — but nothing is promised, and you shouldn't take this role assuming one.

• Start: as soon as the right person is available.

About QIS Packaging

QIS Packaging is a Brisbane-based B2B packaging supplier serving customers across Australia. We're building an enterprise operational portal that will run the entire business — quoting, orders, invoicing, CRM, purchasing, warehouse, and customer/supplier self-service — replacing disconnected systems, spreadsheets and manual processes with one unified platform. This is the technology backbone of a company scaling rapidly, and over the next six months you'll build it.

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to lead the build-out of our operational portal on a 6-month fixed-term contract. This is a hands-on, end-to-end role: you'll architect and ship features that staff and customers rely on every day — from the AI-assisted quoting engine to the CRM, supply-chain workflows, and customer/supplier portals.

Because you're the first engineer here, the role is wider than the code. You'll set the standards, make the architecture calls, and be the person the business asks when something technical needs deciding. There's no one to escalate to and no established playbook — you're writing it. In exchange you get a clean run at the decisions, direct access to the owner, and no committee between you and shipping.

You'll need to work two ways at once. Solo: self-directed, unblocking yourself, setting your own priorities and holding your own quality bar with nobody checking your work. And as part of a team: sitting with the people who quote, purchase, pick and invoice, drawing requirements out of them, explaining trade-offs in plain English, and taking feedback from staff who won't describe problems in technical terms. Engineers who can only do the first half struggle here. So do engineers who can only do the second.

This is not a "we're open to AI tools" role. Directing AI agents is the default method here, it is a condition of the job, and we will assess it at interview.

You must be able to:

• Build through Claude and Claude Code as your primary environment — planning, writing, testing, reviewing and shipping through them, rather than hand-writing every line.

• Work genuinely agentically. Decompose work into tasks an agent can own, brief them properly, run several in parallel where that's the right call, and supervise output instead of babysitting it.

• Use the wider toolchain fluently — MCP servers, subagents, custom skills and commands, spec-driven and test-driven agent workflows, agents wired into CI. Knowing the chat window isn't the same as knowing the tooling.

• Stay tool-agnostic. Claude and Claude Code are our primary stack, but we don't mind if you also reach for Cursor, Copilot, Codex or whatever ships next month. We care that you pick the right tool for the job and can say why.

• Know exactly where the limits are. Review and critically validate everything an agent produces. Agentic speed is worth nothing if you can't tell when the output is wrong, and that judgement is precisely what we're paying a senior engineer for.

• Point the same thinking at the business. Where an agent or an automation can replace a manual process at QIS, we want you spotting it and building it — not just writing the portal, but making the company run better.

If your experience with AI tooling amounts to autocomplete and the occasional chat window, this role will not suit you, and we'd rather say so now.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design, development and delivery of features across the portal — quoting, orders, invoicing, CRM, purchasing, warehouse, and customer/supplier portals

• Translate business requirements into well-architected, production-ready software

• Own features end to end: data models, business logic, integrations, testing and release

• Run an agentic development workflow day to day — scoping work for agents, directing them, and keeping throughput high without letting quality slip

• Identify and build AI and automation into the business itself, beyond the portal, where it removes manual work

• Work directly with non-technical staff across the business to shape what gets built, then take it away and build it

• Build and maintain integrations with third-party systems (accounting/inventory, email, payments, carriers, AI services)

• Uphold a high quality bar — clean, tested, secure, maintainable code, even while moving quickly

• Review and critically validate AI-generated work; know when something isn't right and fix it

• Establish the engineering standards for the business from scratch — version control, testing, deployment, documentation, and the agentic workflow itself — and leave them in a state the next person can pick up

Required skills & experience

• Demonstrable agentic ways of working — non-negotiable. Real, current experience directing AI agents to build production software: Claude and Claude Code as a primary way of working, plus fluency with the surrounding tooling (MCP, subagents, custom skills/commands, agent-driven testing). Be ready to talk us through how you actually work, on what, and what you've shipped this way.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping business-critical web applications

• Proven ability to work solo — experience as the sole or lead engineer on a project, comfortable being the only technical person and self-directed without a team around you

• Proven ability to work in a team — a genuine collaborator with non-technical colleagues and stakeholders, able to run requirements sessions, explain trade-offs without jargon, and take direction as well as give it

• Strong command of Git/GitHub and modern version-control and CI/CD workflows

• Backend: PHP and the Laravel framework, with solid OO design, clean architecture, and service/action-class patterns

• Frontend: Vue 3 (Composition API) and TypeScript; experience with Inertia.js is a strong plus

• Databases: strong relational database design and query skills, with an eye to scalability and uptime

• Testing discipline: automated unit, feature and end-to-end testing (e.g. Pest, Playwright) and static analysis

• Sound judgement around security and data integrity — RBAC, audit logging, and precise handling of financial calculations

• Comfortable committing to a fixed-term engagement and delivering against a six-month horizon

Nice to have

• Experience integrating LLMs (e.g. the Claude API) into production workflows

• Experience building or maintaining internal agent tooling — MCP servers, custom skills, agent pipelines

• Experience with business-system integrations such as inventory platforms (e.g. Unleashed) or Microsoft Graph

• Background building quoting, ordering, inventory or finance systems

• Experience as the first technical hire in a business

Details — please note

• This is a 6-month fixed-term contract. It is not a permanent position, though there is a genuine opportunity to extend for the right person.

• This is our first in-house engineering role. You will be the only engineer in the business.

• Agentic development is a requirement of the role, not an optional way of working.

• Full-time hours, Brisbane-based, hybrid — office and work from home

• Reports directly to the business owner

• Start: as soon as the right person is available

If you're a senior engineer who builds agentically as second nature, who can run solo and still work well with a team of non-engineers, and who wants six months to own the technology of a fast-growing Australian business outright — we'd love to hear from you.