Product Engineer

Job description

**Our Story** Workyard puts everything between the job site and the office on autopilot for contractors. GPS-verified time tracking, automatic cost coding, compliance caught before it becomes a problem, and verified data flowing straight into payroll and accounting without anyone touching it twice. Thousands of workers clock in with Workyard every day across construction businesses in the US. We are building a team where the best work of your career happens. Real ownership from your first month, people around you who are exceptional at what they do, and a company small enough that what you build is unmistakably yours. We are proud of what we have made here and more excited about where it will go with the right people in it. **About us** Workyard was built by a brother-and-sister team who ran payroll for 500+ field workers and couldn't find a single tool that got the hours right, so they built one. Founded in 2018, pivoted from staffing marketplace to SaaS in 2021 when marketplace customers started asking to use the tool for their whole team. Today the company has about 70 people across Australia and the US and is growing fast. Construction contractors have been sold software that didn't work before, so they don't hand out trust. When we earn it, a foreman telling other contractors "this one actually works" does more than any marketing budget. **The Role** We don't hire engineers to take tickets. We hire them to build products. You’ll own the lifecycle of delivering products end to end. Shape ideas with Product Managers, build it alongside your engineering peers, ship it, measure it and help decide what happens next. You'll build for one of the largest industries in the US and one of the least digitized. Plenty of contractors still run payroll off paper timesheets, spreadsheets and a foreman's memory. The rules are hard. Multi-rate overtime, prevailing wage, certified payroll, union agreements and crews moving between job sites every day. Getting that right in software is the work. What we build is changing shape too. More and more, Workyard does the checking so the office doesn't have to. It flags the missed punch, the wrong cost code and the overtime nobody approved before payroll runs. Designing how contractors come to trust that, one workflow at a time, while each piece still delivers value today, is a big part of this role. And how software gets built is changing. AI-assisted development has shrunk the gap between an idea and a working version. We want builders who already work that way. Prototype in an afternoon, get it in front of a contractor within days. You’ll be mainly working across our React front end and Laravel back-end hosted on AWS. Our stack also includes native iOS/Android apps. This role is based from our Sydney office (Hybrid, 2 days a week in office), reporting directly to the Head of Product (Co-founder). **What you'll own** - **Understanding how contractors really work.** Dig into our customer research, alongside product managers to learn how crews, foremen and office teams run their day. Get to the why behind each workflow and find exactly where it breaks, whether that's a missed punch, a wrong cost code or a payroll export someone rebuilds by hand every week. - **Taking products from first conversation to production.** Own the full path from discovery through technical design, build, release and every iteration after. You don't hand anything off along the way, you are a pivotal part of every decision that shaped what shipped and the impact it had. - **Making the calls that matter.** Decide what we should build, how to build it and what to leave out. Tie each decision to how it impacts customers, like faster payroll, fewer disputed hours or cleaner job costs, and to what it means for Workyard's growth. - **Holding the bar on good software experiences.** Weigh in on design, review code with care and help the engineers around you get better. As the team grows, help shape how we build. - **Making the tradeoffs.** Balance speed, accuracy and simplicity on every project. Some things can ship rough and improve later. Others have to be right the first time because contractors depend on them. Explain your calls in plain language anyone can follow. **Your Skills (Non negotiable)** - **You've owned a product end to end.** You've taken something meaningful from idea to production, written the code and stayed accountable for whether it worked. Roughly 3+ years building and shipping production software. - **You're a strong full-stack engineer.** You write clean production code with sound fundamentals. This role needs range with a front-end lean, not deep systems specialization. - **You design data models that hold up.** You've designed the data model and architecture for a real product, not just built on top of one. You think about how records relate, how they change over time and what happens when an integration sends something messy. - **You spend time with the people you build for.** You have a habit of wanting to understand the people who use what you build, and you can point to things you built differently because of it. - **You have high standards for simple experiences.** Something that technically works isn't good enough. The higher bar is judging if something is simple to use and easy to understand. - **You find the simpler path.** You weigh customer impact against engineering effort together, and often find a cheaper way to get the same result. - **You have a viewpoint on agentic experiences.** You've thought about how a product can take work off someone's plate, starting with suggestions they approve and moving through to earning trust to take tasks they can hand off completely. - **You communicate clearly and work well with others.** You can explain a technical decision to a customer, a sales rep or an engineer and have each of them understand it. You ask for input early and bring people along instead of working around them. - **You prototype early.** When you have an idea, your first move is to build a rough version with AI tools and test it. - **You're comfortable without a map.** You work well with loose direction and lots of autonomy. When a problem is fuzzy, you help shape it instead of waiting for a spec. **Who you are** You're an engineer who also is a product thinker. You'd rather understand the research yourself than be handed a spec, and you'd rather ship something rough on Tuesday than something perfect next month. You care about the code, but you care more about whether it changed someone's day in the field. - You solve problems with other people, not around them. You challenge assumptions, make your case and change minds - You want to understand the customer’s problem, own the experience and build it yourself - You're excited that AI lets you code faster and better, because it frees up more of your time for product thinking **This role is not for you if** - Working on deep technical problems excites you more than solving customer facing problems - You'd prefer someone else be accountable for the product experience, scoping and planning, you just want to focus on coding. - You're not interested in learning how construction, payroll or the business side works. You'd rather stay in the code.