Senior Software Engineer

About Factor House

We’re helping developers wrangle real-time data streams with clarity, control and none of the fluff. Our tools are built by engineers, for engineers, making stream processing easier to manage and scale. Today, we offer Kpow and Flex, two powerful products that simplify Kafka and Flink for teams at companies like Hewlett Packard, Airwallex, NORD/LB, Block and a bunch of Fortune 500s.

Factor House started in Melbourne in 2019, born out of a need for more pragmatic, developer-first tooling. Since then, we’ve quietly grown our global customer base by word of mouth and recently raised a $5M seed round led by Blackbird and OIF to kick things up a notch.

We’re focused on building thoughtful products for developers and delighting our customers along the way.

About the Role

As a Senior Clojure Engineer at Factor House - you’ll get to work across our two main products - Kpow and Flex whilst also playing a key role in building new products to add to our product tool belt.

This role will require you to go deep into the weeds where you’ll help build and improve the systems behind our real-time data tools. You’ll work closely with the team to design features that solve real problems, help shape how we plan and release, and talk directly to customers to understand what they need. Most of your work will be in Clojure, but what matters most is how you approach problems rather than which language you use.

Who we’re looking for

• Worked directly on a core product, owning features from idea to release
• You’ve built backend systems in Clojure and are familiar with the JVM, Jetty12, Quartz, AWS SDK, and Kafka/Flink client libraries
• Experience with with ClojureScript and React 19, and you’re comfortable with re-frame or similar tools for managing state (like Redux or Zustand)
• You know your way around the JavaScript/React ecosystem and have used tools like StorybookJS, xyflow, and TailwindCSS
• Experience with modern infrastructure tools such as AWS, MSK, Glue schema registry, ECR, ECS, EKS, and Fargate, and are confident with Docker (Kubernetes and Helm charts are a nice to have but not required!)
• You’ve spent time and have a keen interest with data streaming solutions such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Flink, Iceberg
• Familiarity with serialisation formats like Avro and Protobuf

What you’ll be doing

• Collaborating closely with your team to shape new features or improvements that tackle real problems for Factor House customers
• Help shape and improve how we plan, test, and roll out releases
• Getting your hands dirty by designing and building features that balance speed and quality. Shipping fast matters, but it still needs to solve the problem
• Taking ownership of key parts of our stack. Maintaining what’s already there while exploring smarter, cleaner, or more scalable ways to solve new challenges
• Giving clear, thoughtful feedback on pull requests or taking the time to respond to feedback on your own code
• Jumping on calls with customers understand their pain points and making their problems your own, so you can design thoughtful solutions that delight engineers
• Influencing product and design decisions about our products
• Pairing with other engineers to work through complex problems, sharing your knowledge across the stack, and leaning on each other to get great solutions over the line

What we offer

• Small team, big impact
• Generous, transparent compensation & equity
• Tech allowances
• Training budget
• Hybrid working for Melbourne-based employees (Located on Timeout's coolest street in the world)
• 20 days annual leave
• Regular team events and offsites to stay connected and have fun

What the interview process will look like:

Chat with our People Experience Manager

Get to know the team, our culture, and what it’s like to work at Factor House.

Systems Design Interview

We'll work together on a collaborative exercise where you can talk us through a system from your past work where you played a key role in design or architecture and delivery.

Technical Team Interview

Show us how you think, solve problems, and collaborate with others. This may be tinkering with some code, solving a real life problem or showing us your slide deck skills with a presentation.

Craft Interview

This stage is about more than just technical skills. Get a sense of what it’s like to work together. We’re looking at how you approach problems, collaborate, stay curious, and keep customers front of mind. You might walk us through a past project, dive into a problem space, or explore how you prioritise and get things done.

Outcome

We’ll let you know either way, whether it’s an offer or not this time. You’ll hear from us with care and transparency.

If you’re interested in the role but don’t meet every requirement, that’s okay - still click apply! We’d love to hear from you