Working at Symbiote

Our story

Owen Windsor and Marcus Nyeholt founded Symbiote with a simple vision: to provide exceptional tech solutions with a considered people-first approach, and have a bit of fun along the way. This diligent and engaged approach has led to more satisfied users and happier organisations like the ones you can read about in our case studies.

Owen and Marcus began honing their user-centric approach to tech solutions in 2009 as SilverStripe. They re-named the business to Symbiote (pronounced Sim-Bee-Oat) to indicate our cooperative, mutually beneficial way of working with clients.

Work culture

We love what we do. We also appreciate that there’s more to life than work, which is why everyone on our team works a four-day week. No overtime, no squeezing-five-days-into-four. Just four normal-length, productive days.

SBS did a story on four-day work weeks that quoted us.

We understand the pressures and stressors that come with complex projects. That’s why we foster a collaborative environment that minimises stress and makes time for fun – like delivering excellent tech, drinking lots of good coffee, and learning as we go.

Modern organisation

We're a modern organisation with a flat management structure, which enables us to be flexible and responsive. To ensure you’re growing and enjoying your time at work, we provide regular coaching sessions and encourage a great workplace culture that supports holistic wellbeing.

You’ll notice the whole team makes it a priority to maintain strong social ties, find opportunities to keep learning, enjoy our epic neighbourhoods, and use our Workplace Wellness Program to encourage each other to get offline and reset.

How we live our values

Diversity is our strength

We employ superb coders/UXers/testers/project wranglers with different kinds of backgrounds, lifestyles and perspectives. We’re a beautiful mix of people: some of us are younger, older, LGBTIQA+, were born into different cultures, have had other careers, have caring responsibilities, live with disabilities … we’re full-spectrum humans making software for other humans in all their diversity.
We work a 4-day full-time work week

We all work a 4-day work week at full pay, in our Melbourne office or remotely from locations around Australia, with flexible hours to fit in all the other people, animals and things in our lives.
Real projects helping real people every day

Our projects improve the days of hundreds of thousands of Victorian travellers with personalised information to streamline their commute, help people find safe escape routes in emergencies like bushfires, provide customer service or digital security teams with secure, bespoke dashboards to access their different systems and databases in one location, and combine human intelligence (HI!) with AI to connect web users with the people, information, services and goods they need – while feeling genuinely connected with the organisations providing all those things.
We care and we share

We acknowledge the traditional owners of Country and have a cultural learning program that expands our team’s knowledge of First Nations perspectives.
Each team member has scheduled time for learning and sharing what they’ve learned. Sometimes we work pro bono for organisations whose values we share.
Why do we do all this? It’s because our purpose is to make smarter tech to help people have better days.

Join us

Do you have a curious mind and love solving problems or writing code that makes people’s lives easier?

Do you love seeing your work out there in the real world helping people?

Would you enjoy working as part of a cheery, smart team to design, develop, optimise, protect and integrate digital products that save someone time and effort so they can ask better questions, solve their problems quickly and enjoy their day?

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