About Fat Zebra
At Fat Zebra, we simplify payments so merchants and platforms can scale with confidence. Our flexible, secure, and scalable payments platform supports over 100,000 merchants of all sizes across Australia. We help our customers navigate the complexities of the payments platform, enabling them to focus on what matters most: growing their business.
About the Role
This is a hands-on, senior engineering role (Ruby on Rails) for someone who loves being close to the customer and the problem, and who builds software that earns its keep in the real world. As a Senior Product Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to take ideas from a rough problem statement to something live in front of customers. You’ll sit in the messy early conversations, help shape what we build and why, and then build it. You’ll care about the experience as much as the implementation, and you won’t consider a feature done until it’s in users’ hands and making an impact for them. You’ll be part of a broader engineering group with deep payments and platform expertise, and you’ll lean on that foundation. Your edge is product instinct, customer empathy and the ability to deliver value quickly.
Key Responsibilities
Your responsibilities will include:
- Build full-stack features end to end, from the front-end experience through to the back-end services behind it.
- Get close to the customer and the problem. Join discovery, talk to users where you can, and bring an engineer’s perspective to what we should build and why before a line of code is written.
- Partner tightly with your Product Manager and Product Designer to turn fuzzy problems into shippable solutions, and to make sharp trade-offs between scope, speed and craft.
- Ship iteratively and measure impact. Get value into customers’ hands quickly, learn from how it’s used, and keep improving rather than chasing perfect first.
- Write well-tested, maintainable code and clean interfaces that hold up as the product and the squad grow.
- Use AI-assisted tooling as a normal part of how you build. To move faster and lift quality, with good judgement about where it helps and where it doesn’t.
- Support what you ship in production, contribute to incident response, and share context generously so the whole squad gets better.
How You Know You Will Succeed
There are several areas where we want you to create impact:
- Customers feel the difference. The things you build solve real problems and you can point to the impact, not just the output.
- You raise the squad’s product instinct. Challenging assumptions, asking “why” and “for whom”, and helping the team build the right thing, faster.
- You deliver across the stack with confidence, and the experiences you ship are polished, reliable and well-tested.
- You and your PM and Designer operate as one tight team, and your peers across engineering trust the squad to deliver.
- AI is woven into how you work in a way that is deliberate, safe and measurable.
About You
To hit the ground running you will need:
- 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, building and running products in production.
- Genuine full-stack capability ideally with Ruby on Rails experience on the backend, being comfortable across a modern front-end and the back-end services behind it, and happy to pick up new tools as needed.
- A product and customer mindset. You think about the user and the outcome, not just the spec, and you’ve worked closely with product and design to shape what gets built.
- A bias for shipping. A track record of getting value to customers quickly and iterating, while keeping code maintainable, observable and testable.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean interfaces, sensible trade-offs, and systems that are resilient under real-world conditions.
- Practical experience with AI tools for engineering, and the judgement to know when they add value and when they don’t.
- Clear communication and a collaborative, low-ego style. You share context generously and value team success.
Experience that will support you could include:
- Working in cross-functional product squads alongside product managers and designers.
- Building a new product from the ground up through spotting insights and opportunity. Not just iterating on something that already exists.
- Familiarity with our stack or a willingness to grow into it. Ruby / Ruby on Rails, Go, a modern JavaScript/TypeScript front-end, and AWS.
- Exposure to event-driven or event-sourced architectures.
- Experience in payments, fintech or other regulated environments is helpful, but not essential. Curiosity and care matter more.
