About Adora

Adora is an Australian startup on a mission to give product teams a real-time, complete view of what their users actually experience. We help teams answer the question: “Where can I see what our users see?” and act on it. With Adora, teams can instantly visualise how their product works in the wild, spot friction, and improve the experience without guesswork.

Launching out of stealth almost a year ago, we’ve already attracted thousands of companies to our waitlist and are proud to count Canva, Notion and Linktree among our early customers. Our team of 17 brings experience from some of the best product-led companies in the world including Canva, Amazon, Dropbox and Figma, and we’re just getting started!

The Role

We’re looking for a Staff / Principal Backend Engineer to help design, build, and own Adora’s core backend and data infrastructure.

This is a senior, hands-on role with real architectural influence. You’ll work closely with the founders and engineering team to scale distributed systems, APIs, and data pipelines that power real-time product insights for our customers.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build distributed backend systems that operate at scale

• Own and evolve our data infrastructure, including ClickHouse and other high-throughput systems

• Build and maintain APIs that support real-time product observability

• Make architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, and scalability

• Partner closely with product and engineering leadership to shape technical direction

• Help raise the bar for engineering quality, systems thinking, and execution

Who You Are

• 7+ years experience as a software engineer, with a strong backend focus

• Deep experience with distributed systems, databases, and APIs

• Hands-on experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/OLAP datastores (e.g. BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Druid)

• Comfortable working in TypeScript / JavaScript

• Based in Sydney (or willing to be)

• Experience in startup or scale-up environments is a strong plus

• Worked with distributed job and queue systems like Temporal

What We Offer

• Competitive remuneration reviewed annually

• ESOP/equity in a fast-growing startup so that everyone shares in Adora’s success

• Remote-first flexibility, with an office in Surry Hills for collaboration (currently working 3 days in office temporarily)

• High ownership and autonomy in a genuinely senior role

• Supportive parental leave policy - 12 weeks fully paid, gender-neutral parental leave plus 4 extra weeks for birthing parent

• Wellbeing getaway benefit: Adorables receive 6 nights paid at an Unyoked cabin per year, plus 3 additional paid leave days to support restorative time away

• Public holiday flexibility where team members can opt to work on public holidays and take time off in lieu when it works best

• Pet-friendly office - Well-behaved pets are welcome, and the occasional animal cameo is part of the atmosphere

• A supportive, product-led engineering culture with a strong technical bar

• The chance to shape how a fast-growing startup operates and scales from the ground up.