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- SkillsRobin Dev Talent Spotlight - July '25
SkillsRobin Dev Talent Spotlight - July '25
Pre-vetted, ANZ-based software engineers looking for opportunities at early stage startups
Lisa Deng
July 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
🌟 Featured Developer Interviews This Month
⏳ 19 years experience
🏠 Sydney
💻 Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Javascript
💵 $250,000
“I really like to clean up the mess other people made while moving very quickly. Taking something that might have been made out of no-code tools or not the best engineering decisions and actually making it robust and scalable - building the foundation for future growth.”
“Ideal roles: part-time consultant or fractional CTO with the potential to convert to full-time in future.”
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⏳ 12 years experience
🏠 Melbourne
💻 Python, Javascript, Django, React
💵 $140,000
✅ Open to working for equity
“I helped lead a team that allows community organisers to call union members to get feedback and help them remain connected to the movement. We completed the project in 3 months from the first line of code in our Django site to a team of a dozen organisers using it for projects with hundreds of union members”
“I’m looking for a role that allows me to use some combination of my skills in software prototyping, education and data visualisation to build communities.”
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Success Stories: Alex from Kumo Study
Alex Kerr is the founder and CEO of Kumo, a learning tool for students with ADHD. We met Alex in June 2024 and helped her find her new CTO Jack. Since then, Kumo has achieved amazing milestones including:
Signing deals with multiple universities to start paid trials of their product
Receiving their first pre-seed investment from a strategic angel investor
Growing their team to 4 people
We caught up with Alex to hear about her approach to finding a CTO as a non-technical founder (she previously trained as an accountant!) and how she achieved her successes.
🗓️ Other notable profiles
⏳ 3 years experience | “When I was 17, I had my own startup which served as an ecommerce platform for book readers… I was leading a team of two people and was successful to operate a startup and make profit.” |
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⏳ 15+ experience | “I have been part of multiple startups from the beginning and have helped them reach MRR stage from zero dollars” |
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⏳ 20 years experience | “One of my proudest achievements is founding a SaaS platform simplifying research workflows, now used by multiple US universities. I built the product end-to-end, leading full-stack development, designing the architecture, and managing the go-to-market strategy.” |
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⏳ 3 years experience | “As a solo developer on a globally scaled up web application I optimised scaling and load handling to reduce build delays from 44 minutes to 12 minutes. Faster feedback cycles means better testing for tech and non tech stakeholders, and made a future cloud migration much less time consuming.” |
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⏳ 5 years experience | “I'm hoping to get some serious experience in the data/AI space. I'd also be happy to work on more advanced frontend or backend web projects.” |
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About SkillsRobin
SkillsRobin is an open-source employee referral program that connects startups with pre-vetted technical talent through trusted industry referrers.
Our fees are simple and founder-friendly:
No upfront costs - you only pay when you hire
$500 for part-time hires, $2,000 for full-time hires - only pay once they join your team
6-month guarantee - additional fee of the same amount only if hire stays 6+ months
10-20x cheaper than traditional recruiting agencies
25% discount on all fees for early, bootstrapping startups (<A$100,000 in funding raised or ARR < $100,000)
All candidates are developers based in ANZ, interested in working with early stage startups and come with referrals from industry professionals, saving you time in the initial screening process.
Questions about any of these profiles or our process? Reply to this email ([email protected]) or learn more on our website.
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