Staff Software Engineer

The Role

Lyrebird is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction across our product. Our systems run real-time AI inside live clinical consults, where latency, accuracy and reliability can’t be traded away lightly. As we move into new markets and take on more of the clinical workflow, the architecture calls we make over the next year will either pay off over time or cost us. Your job is to make sure they pay off.

This role suits someone who goes looking for the hardest problem in the building instead of waiting to be handed it. You can sit with a messy question, work out what the real problem is, and come back with a decision and the reasoning behind it. You still write code, often, because sometimes that’s the fastest way to prove a point. You call out problems directly, including in your own designs, and you’d rather the engineers around you get better than come to depend on you.

About Us

Every day in Australia, 10 people die from preventable medical errors. Not from incurable diseases, but from misdiagnosis, missed information, and clinicians making decisions under impossible pressure. At the centre of that failure is a doctor spending 40% of their day on paperwork instead of patients. Lyrebird is fixing that.

We turn real clinical conversations into accurate notes, automatically. From there, Lyrebird takes on the admin that follows: letters and documents, workflow automation, patient data pulled together from disconnected systems, and communication with patients and other clinicians. Thousands of clinicians across multiple disciplines use Lyrebird every day in environments where accuracy, safety, and time matter deeply. We’re growing fast across Melbourne, the UK, and Asia, and there’s a finite window right now to set the standard for clinical AI in Australia before anyone else does.

What you’ll do

• Define the technical direction for core parts of the platform, and make the architecture calls other teams build on

• Spot problems before anyone has scoped them, like a scaling limit six months out or a design that won’t hold up in the next market, and deal with them early

• Take on the hardest builds yourself, from real-time pipelines to the production issues nobody else can crack

• Shape how we build, evaluate and ship AI systems, so clinicians can trust what ends up in front of them

• Push back on Product, Clinical and engineering leadership about what we build and why, as a peer, not someone working through a backlog

• Raise the engineering bar across teams through design reviews, standards and the example you set

• Grow senior engineers until they can make the calls you make

What you’ll bring

• A track record of setting technical direction for complex production systems that mattered, and seeing it through

• Real experience building or running AI-powered systems in production, including how you tell whether they’re working

• Influence beyond your own team, shown through decisions others adopted and engineers you helped grow

• Good judgment on trade-offs between speed, quality and risk, and the ability to explain them clearly to people who aren’t engineers

• Comfort with ambiguity, and a habit of turning unclear problems into a plan people can act on

Nice to have

• Experience in healthcare, clinical software or other safety-critical environments

• Familiarity with TypeScript and AWS

• Experience with real-time audio, speech or streaming systems

• Time at an early-stage company during a period of fast growth

Every minute a clinician spends on documentation is a minute they’re not spending with a patient. The technical decisions you make here will shape how much time clinicians get back, how good their information is, and in some cases whether a patient gets the care they need. That’s what’s at stake, and it’s why the people who do this work well care about it so much.

We’re building a team that reflects the diversity of the people who benefit from our work. We want Lyrebird to be a place where everyone feels safe, supported, and able to thrive. If you’re from an underrepresented background in tech, we strongly encourage you to apply, even if you don’t meet every requirement.