Expressions of Interest - AI-first Engineer

A LITTLE ABOUT US
When it comes to food experience, me&u helps you always feel like a local. The company’s vision is to bring that feeling to everyone, anywhere. No matter what neighbourhood you live in or visit, you’ll always know the perfect place to go and exactly what to order.
me&u is used by 6000+ bars, pubs, and restaurants to create memorable guest experiences and grow their brands. With 200 staff in five countries, and headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, me&u is the consolidation of two leading hospitality technology companies: Mr Yum and me&u, who merged in November 2023.

The Engineering role is changing. 
We’re always looking for strong engineers to join our product streams, and this ad covers the whole range from Senior through Staff, Senior Staff and Principal to Senior Principal. What changes with seniority is the scope of your judgment: how much ambiguity you take on, and how far your standards reach beyond your own work.
We believe in full-breadth engineers, a.k.a the uncomfortably named ‘broken comb’ shaped people with multiple areas of expertise, who can deliver value end-to-end in a small, fully cross-functional team.
We build AI-natively. Agents do most of the implementation here; engineers shape the problem, write the specs and context that let agents succeed, and own the quality of what ships. You’ll be expected to work this way from day one, and the more senior you are, the more you’ll set that standard for others: what good context looks like, which guardrails are executable rather than written down, and when AI output is good enough versus when it needs a human hand.
We already work this way: the AFR profiled how our engineers run agents overnight so their days go to customers and problems, not keyboards.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Co-create with product and design: Sit in discovery, not just delivery. Bring technical possibility into shaping, and turn intent into specs and story slices that both humans and agents can work from.
• Direct and verify, then ship: Plan work so agents can execute it, review their output for logic and design rather than syntax, and take accountability for what lands in production.
• Build the foundations agents inherit: Maintain the context files, hooks, architectural lint rules and regression suites that make our codebases safer to delegate into over time, not riskier.
• Design and implement features: Lead the design of new features and their underlying architecture, and make sure they fit the system as a whole and the business goals behind them.
• Code reviews: Review AI-generated and human-written PRs with the same rigour. Enforce our conventions, make actionable suggestions, and help decide which classes of change can eventually be trusted with lighter review.
• Collaboration and mentorship: Pair with and mentor less experienced engineers, including on how to work well with agents, to build a collaborative, growth-oriented team.
• Knowledge sharing and technical leadership: Take part in our engineering guilds, share what you learn, and make your voice heard on our architecture and practices.
• Own delivery: Manage your own work to timely, efficient delivery. At more senior levels, do the same for the people and agents working alongside you.

HOW SENIORITY SHOWS UP
These map to the levels in our career framework. Each level includes the ones before it.

• Senior: You take an ambiguous customer problem, break it into testable hypotheses, and land a recommendation with clear reasoning and success criteria. You design moderately complex features and write the design docs for them. You experiment with new agent workflows and share what you learn with the team, and you pair with teammates when they’re blocked.
• Staff: You own the solution design for an initiative, engaging product, design and the relevant custodianship leads to validate ideas and make the trade-offs. Before shipping a customer-facing change you think through the second-order effects (support load, venue operations, billing edge cases) and adjust the approach without being asked. You lead by example on AI-native practice and mentor less experienced engineers.
• Senior Staff: You lead system-level design across multiple components or domains and champion our engineering principles. Faced with conflicting signals (customer need, tech debt, pace) you make a clear directional call and document the reasoning so others, including agents, can make the follow-on decisions without escalating. You make sure the team’s use of AI is consistently lifting its output, and you actively create room for mid-level engineers to grow.
• Principal: You connect architecture to business value across streams. You spot two streams solving the same problem in parallel, bring them together, build the shared scaffolding others run on, and frame that investment in the customer impact it enables. You right-size solutions to real scaling needs, and you mentor engineers up to and including Staff.
• Senior Principal: You shape technical direction across platforms and domains and solve the cross-cutting design problems nobody else owns. You shape long-range technical strategy with the executive team, less by having every answer than by making sure every risk and trade-off is on the table so people leave aligned and clear on next steps. When a senior engineer brings you a high-stakes call, you coach them through the decision so they own that class of call next time.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• Agentic fluency: Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex or similar) in production work: plan mode, worktrees, hooks, and choosing the right model for the task. You can show us a codebase you made easier for agents to work in.
• Distributed systems: Commercial experience designing and running distributed systems and microservices on a cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• Backend: Strong in at least one backend language such as TypeScript (Node.js), C#, Python, Ruby or Java. TypeScript/Node.js is a strong advantage.
• Across the stack: Comfortable in React on the front end and with relational or document databases on the back, and able to design and implement REST or GraphQL APIs.
• Quality and operations: Test-driven habits, observability (logging, monitoring, alerting) and practical web security.
• Product judgment: Experience working closely with product managers and designers, and comfort talking to customers directly. You can explain what you’re building and why to someone outside engineering.
• Problem solving: Ability to take on complex, ambiguous problems and turn them into a clear, buildable path.
• Communication: Ability to write system designs, give constructive feedback in review, and keep stakeholders in the loop.
• Attention to detail: Willingness to take responsibility for the quality of engineering solutions, including performance, scalability and maintainability.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience in hospitality, payments or another regulated, high-volume consumer domain.
• Experience with distributed systems
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.

WHY ME&U
Work with impact and purpose. We’re helping the hospitality and entertainment industries to thrive and me&u is at the forefront of this. Expect collaboration and interesting problems to solve. 
Work with great people. Work alongside a supportive, diverse and inclusive team. You’ll have the trust, freedom and support to experiment and not be afraid of failure but to learn from it...and have fun together along the way. 
Work that challenges you. We’re growing quickly, and you will too. You’ll have numerous opportunities to embrace discomfort, grow and learn as me&u expands and scales globally. 
Work that works for you. We’re a flexible, remote-friendly place with inclusive leave options and day-to-day work times to suit your routine. We prioritise our team’s mental health & overall wellbeing, with access to mental health days and support programs.
Diversity and Inclusion Commitment
We’re committed to growing and empowering an inclusive me&u community. That’s why we actively encourage applications from candidates from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you require accessibility assistance at any stage of the process, please let us know.