Open role · Engineering

Forward deployed first. Engineer second.

The engineering is the how. Knowing what to work on, shipping it into the real operation and driving the outcome is the job.

Role details

Location: Australia · Sydney preferred
Employment: Full-time
Working style: Hybrid · customer-facing

Apply via email

norman@whispa.net

Why this role exists

Customer reality is where the product gets built.

OpenDebt supports collection teams with QA and Agent Assist, and its autonomous collector is working live accounts. Each deployment starts with understanding which tasks need human support, which suit automation and how both fit the customer’s policies and systems.

Today the founders do that work themselves. You will work beside them, then own more of it: learning the operation, building the solution, reading the evidence and carrying the useful patterns back into the core product.

What you will own

From ambiguous problem to production outcome.

01
Own customer deployments from the first working session through go-live and measurable adoption.
02
Sit with collectors and operations leaders to understand policies, systems, constraints and the workarounds nobody documented.
03
Build and configure the solution across AI behavior, integrations, data, QA and operational workflows.
04
Inspect calls, logs and outcome data; diagnose what happened and ship the fix rather than forwarding the problem.
05
Translate repeated customer needs into reusable product capabilities with the core engineering team.
06
Communicate clearly with technical teams, frontline operators and executives when the trade-offs are real.

Your first 90 days

Learn by owning something real.

First 30 days

Learn the product and the collection operation from live evidence. Join an active deployment and take ownership of a defined problem inside it.

By day 60

Ship an improvement that changes a customer or consumer outcome, with a measure that shows whether it worked.

By day 90

Lead a deployment workstream end to end and turn what you learned into a playbook or product capability the next customer inherits.

You might be a fit if

You want the whole problem.

You might currently be a product engineer, solutions engineer, technical consultant or something less neatly named.

You can ship software and reason across APIs, data and production systems. Python, TypeScript and SQL are useful; learning quickly matters more than matching every tool.
You like customers. Ambiguous conversations give you energy because they usually contain the real product requirement.
You take responsibility for the result, not just your part of the implementation.
You can move quickly without becoming casual about compliance, consumer impact or evidence.
You explain technical decisions plainly and can push back with judgment when an easy answer would be the wrong one.

What you get

Founding scope without the spectator seat.

Direct access to the founders, customers and product decisions. Your work will change live deployments, and the feedback loop is measured in days rather than quarters.

The offer includes a competitive salary and meaningful equity. We will discuss the range and trade-offs openly in the first conversation.

We use the best AI tools we can find and expect you to improve how the whole team builds, investigates and learns with them.

The process

01
Founder conversation
A direct discussion about the company, the role and what you want next.
02
Practical working session
Work through a real, anonymised problem from our production call stack with the people you would work beside.
03
Mutual decision
A final conversation with both founders, clear references and a transparent offer.

Apply

Show us what you have made happen.

Send Norman a short note about a difficult problem you owned, what you personally did and what changed. A CV or LinkedIn profile is useful; a clear story is better.