Senior Software Engineer

Young people all over the world deserve a world-class science education. Stile is on a mission to ensure that students are able to critically evaluate what they see in their social media feeds, and feel confident using science and technology to solve the big issues of tomorrow. 

Stile is used in 1 in 3 Australian secondary schools, with around 45% of year 7-10 students subscribed. Every week over 250,000 students and their teachers use Stile’s web platform to explore and analyse the science behind the big issues facing us globally, a number that will grow by more than 10x over the next two years as we continue to expand internationally. We expect Stile to become one of the biggest and most influential K-12 SaaS platforms in the world.

That’s quite some reach, and it’s a responsibility we take extremely seriously. When you join our small team, you have a unique opportunity to have a massive impact on the future of science education.

We need your help! 

As a Software Engineer at Stile, you’ll use your technical skills to design and build thoughtful, high-quality features across our platform - tools you’d be proud to see teachers using and students learning from.

You'll take the lead on solving a critical problem, and be responsible for delivering a pragmatic solution that embodies excellent engineering tradeoffs. For example: 

• Transform student results into insights about their literacy, numeracy, critical skills, and knowledge so that teachers can intervene faster and more effectively
• Build amazing interactive simulations that let students explore the processes that they're learning about
• Adapt best practice teaching practices into our digital platform, so that every teacher can teach more effectively, and every student can learn
• Track what lab equipment schools have, and what they need for their upcoming lessons so that we can send them exactly what they need before they need it
• Present profound insights about student outcomes and high impact teaching strategies to senior government and school leaders to help inform the future of education policy  

This is your chance to use your engineering skills to make a tangible impact on how the next generation learns to think critically, solve problems, and tackle tomorrow’s challenges.

Why you’ll love it here

We set engineers up to do their best work:

• By surrounding you with a highly motivated and talented team of experienced engineers and passionate new starters.
• Through a genuine commitment to your professional development, with training, mentorship, regular feedback, and opportunities to grow.
• With close collaboration alongside our Science and Design teams to build the best possible platform for learning.
• By focusing on quality over quantity -  building things right for the long term rather than rushing short-term fixes.
• Through a fast, continuous release cadence, with engineers deeply involved in design decisions and encouraged to take calculated risks.
• By giving you real impact at scale - when you ship a feature, hundreds of thousands of students will see it right away.
• With respect for your work-life balance through flexibility, sustainable pacing, and generous parental leave.
• Through a modern tech stack: AWS, Terraform, Rust, Buildkite, Ruby + Sorbet APIs, React + TypeScript, and simulations in TypeScript.
• By holding high standards for performance, accessibility, and usability, backed by rigorous testing, great documentation, and a culture of asking “how should this work?” not “what’s easiest?”.
• With the resources and guidance you need to grow: clear expectations, opportunities to lead, and support from experienced engineering managers.
• By being a company owned and led by engineers, including our CEO, CTO, and founder, so great engineering gets noticed and rewarded.
• By operating in a nimble, independent organisation, while drawing on specialist skills, tools, and big-company subscriptions from our larger parent organisation.
• With the opportunity to work from our offices in Brooklyn, Portland, Boston, Dublin, Bangalore and beyond, or explore secondments into global teams.

About you:

• You’re a critical thinker who sees the bigger picture and cuts to the core of problems.
• You have experience building user-focused software, whether web apps, mobile apps, games, or visualisations,  and enjoy working across the stack.
• You care deeply about usability, accessibility, and performance, and you’re comfortable weighing trade-offs.
• You’re fluent with modern front-end frameworks (like React + TypeScript) and curious about new technologies, from back-end systems to interactive libraries.
• You know that good engineering isn’t just about code. You think about people, processes, and systems for continuous improvement.
• You collaborate well across disciplines, and you put the user’s perspective at the top of your mind.
• You value teamwork over ego: you listen first, raise up your peers, and know that success comes from the whole team working well together.
• You balance pragmatism and ambition, improving things around you while ensuring value is shipped.
• You’re confident working independently, but also quick to learn, ready to ask for help, and generous in supporting others.
• You may not know our exact stack yet, but you have a track record of picking up new technologies quickly.

Life at Stile

We’re here to build something real and enduring. A company that in years to come we look back on and are proud of what we achieved, and how we achieved it. 

So, what’s it like working with us? 

• Colleagues worth working with.
  You’ll join an amazing 80-strong team of teachers, scientists, artists, and engineers.  We hold ourselves, and each other, to a high standard, and love what we do.
• Work on something that really matters.   
  In partnership with teachers, we’re coaching students to become problem solvers and critical thinkers. We believe that with a strong command of science, tomorrow’s citizens and leaders are set up to sort the misinformation from the facts.
• Support always.   
  Stile is its people, and it’s important we are creating an environment where you’re supported, happy and able to do your best work. We have strong management and feedback frameworks, and a great benefits program check it out here Stile benefits  
• A fantastic office environment.   
  When we can, we spend time in the office. It has a huge central kitchen, lots of places to put your feet up to work and even end of trip facilities if you ride in.  
• Flexibility.   
  We expect that you work hard, but you’ll have flexible hours and you’re the master of your own schedule.
• Your own professional development.   
  We’re lifelong learners here at Stile. Alongside teaching you everything you need to know to succeed in this role, we provide a generous PD allowance. 

Hours and location

Our head office is located in the ‘Paris end’ of Melbourne CBD.  Overall we’re an “in-person” culture (we enjoy working together face to face), but we’re also flexible with a mix of working from home and the office, once you settle in.

Sound interesting?

Great! We want to know more about you, so click apply, and provide the following to show you’re great at following the details.    

• A cover letter addressed to Ben Taylor (no more than a page) explaining why you would smash an engineering role at Stile out of the park. Include a paragraph on which Behaviours of an Effective Stile-ist most resonate with you or which you disagree with and why.
• Your resume.

Got questions about our hiring process? You can find the answers here:https://stileeducation.com/au/who-we-are/hiring-process/. 

We can't wait to hear from you!