Software Developer

Salary: $80,000 – $110,000 per year

About us: Sustainable Life Group is a dynamic and fast-growing general advice licensee that was founded in 2016 with a simple yet ambitious goal; to make life insurance accessible to all Australians, whilst supporting advice practices in navigating the ever-changing landscape of regulation and compliance.

We're transforming Australia's life insurance distribution industry through a digital-first CRM platform that enables consultants to operate up to 95% more efficiently. At Sustainable Life Group, we're more than just a technology-backed advice platform. We're partners in building a sustainable, compliant, and successful life insurance future with consumers at our core.

About the role: We're looking for a junior developer to join the team building and running our core CRM platform. The application stack is a Python (Django) backend with a React/TypeScript front end, running on AWS with a PostgreSQL database and Auth0 handling security. Experience as a full stack developer is ideal, but a strength in one and a willingness to pick up the other is genuinely fine.

We use AI in our day-to-day development, specifically Claude. We expect you to use it too. Experience running and managing coding agents is a real advantage, and if you haven't done much of it yet, you'll learn quickly here because it's simply how we work.

Your first tasks will centre on helping us reduce the backlog of support tickets. That's deliberate. It's the fastest way to get across the codebase, understand how consultants actually use the platform, and start delivering value in your first few weeks. From there you'll move into feature work alongside the rest of the team.

We work in an agile rhythm and the team structure is flat, so there's no layer between you and the work. We'll teach and mentor you until you have the confidence to work independently, and in return we'd like you to take on real responsibility as you find your feet. Ability and a willingness to learn matter more to us than time served in the industry.

Responsibilities:

• Work through support tickets and defects across the platform, using them to build a working knowledge of the codebase and of how our users operate.

• Build and ship features end to end, from Python services and database work through to the React components your users see, rather than handing work off at the boundary.

• Use AI tooling, primarily Claude, as a core part of your development workflow, while retaining full understanding and ownership of the code that ships.

• Participate in the agile cycle, including planning, estimation, stand-ups and retrospectives, and raise blockers early with options.

• Work with AWS services as part of building, deploying and supporting the application, with infrastructure managed as code using Terraform.

• Follow our git workflow in GitHub, from branching and pull requests through to automated testing and deployment via GitHub Actions.

• Design and query relational data structures in PostgreSQL, with an eye to correctness and performance.

• Contribute to code review, testing and documentation, and help lift the quality of what the whole team produces.

• Take increasing ownership of areas of the product as your confidence grows, including making and defending design decisions.

• Translate technical constraints and trade-offs clearly to non-technical colleagues across the business.

Skills, Experience & Qualifications:

• A degree or similar qualification in computer science or a related discipline such as engineering, technology or mathematics.

• Commercial software development experience across both backend and front end work. Our stack is Python and React, so experience in those is ideal, but solid full stack experience in a comparable stack is fine if you're prepared to learn ours.

• Working experience with a relational database. We use PostgreSQL, but any RDBMS background is fine.

• Cloud experience. AWS is our target platform, though experience with other cloud vendors will absolutely be considered.

• Experience working in an agile team environment.

• A genuine willingness to learn, and the appetite to take on responsibility in a flat team rather than wait to be directed.

• Clear written and verbal communication, and the confidence to ask questions early rather than get stuck.

Nice to have

• Experience running and managing AI coding agents.

• Relevant industry certifications, such as AWS Certified Developer or Solutions Architect, are looked upon favourably.

• Exposure to Auth0 or similar identity and access management platforms.

• Open source contributions, side projects or previous work we can review. Please include links with your application.

• Background in financial services, with a preference for life insurance, and experience with CRM platforms or core operational systems.

Experience

1 - 3+ years of commercial development experience is preferred, though we will consider less based on demonstrated capability. If you can show us what you can do, we're interested.

Our hiring process: There is a small coding test, completed offline in your own time. We expect you to use AI to generate the solution, because that's how we build here. If you're able to, we'd also welcome the transcript of your session with the coding agent and the git history of the repository. Both are optional, and neither is a trap. We're simply interested in how you approached the problem, how you directed the agent, where you pushed back on what it gave you, and how the solution took shape over time. A messy path to a good answer tells us more than a single perfect commit. If your tooling doesn't export cleanly, or you worked in a way that doesn't produce either of these, that's no problem at all - just send us the code.

Being comfortable with AI is only half of what we're looking for. The other half is strong coding fundamentals, and the two are not in tension. AI makes a good developer considerably faster, but it doesn't make a developer. We're not interested in generated code that the candidate can't explain, so be prepared to walk us through the code in the interview, justify the design decisions, discuss what you'd do differently, and write code manually if we ask.

What it's like to work for us: We're a team of passionate and agile people, who're dedicated to making a meaningful difference for Australians and the practices we support. Our vision goes beyond being a workplace – we're here to drive positive change in the industry and create lasting impact for our clients.