Data engineering in Brisbane
A Brisbane mining contractor or METS firm reporting to a mine owner pulls numbers from fleet management, maintenance, timesheets and production systems, and each system has its own idea of a shift, a machine and a tonne. The weekly report to the client is often assembled by hand in a spreadsheet by the one person who knows which export to trust, and it runs late whenever they are on leave.
We build pipelines that land each source once, with one agreed definition of a shift, a machine and a site, lineage from every reported figure back to the system it came from, and checks that fail loudly when a feed is late or changes shape. On FM360 we learned to normalise data at the boundary before comparing anything, and that discipline is what lets two systems finally agree on the same number.
The state is one of Brisbane's largest software buyers. The Queensland Government, its departments and its hospital and health services run a large share of the city's technology work, directly and through the consultancies and suppliers around them. They need public services that work for someone on fibre in the inner city and someone on a weak mobile signal in a remote community, and internal systems that let a small team look after a very big state.
Mining services are the second pillar. Queensland's mining equipment, technology and services firms sell into the Bowen Basin and to mines around the world, and many run their engineering and head offices from Brisbane. Their software problems come from distance: equipment reporting over intermittent links, maintenance data from sites hours from the nearest city, and field crews working on rosters. Health adds a third: a large public health system spread across the state, where a clinician in a regional town and a specialist in Brisbane need the same record. Looking further out, the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games are already driving infrastructure work across the south-east, and the tourism, events and food businesses around them are planning for demand their systems have never seen.
Hiring costs less than in Sydney or Melbourne. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Brisbane at A$101,980, from 87 reported salaries. Specialist skills are the harder part: an engineer who has built for remote sites, offline field work or a booking spike is a rare hire in any city. That is where we fit: senior engineers on a defined piece of work within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Neither Queensland nor India changes its clocks, so the window sits at the same point in your day all year round. Your morning belongs to your own team; the afternoon is for stand-ups, reviews and decisions with the engineer who writes your code, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
We are the right fit when a system your team has no time to build has a clear shape, when you need senior engineers on it within days, or when a hire is still months from starting. Begin with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. Agencies and consultancies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
Two definitions of the same metric, computed in two places. We pick one, write it as a tested model in version control, and point every report at it, so the argument moves from whose number is right to what the definition should be.
A job reports success while the report still shows yesterday. We give every table a written freshness guarantee, monitor what the reader actually sees rather than the job that feeds it, and alert a person when the guarantee is missed.
A CRM, an ERP or a work-order tool reachable only through its API. We build the sync with retries, rate limits and normalisation at the boundary, and keep append-only snapshots so last Tuesday is a query rather than a restore.
Analytical queries running against the application database at the worst possible moment. We move them to a columnar store, keep Postgres for transactions, and feed one from the other by change data capture or scheduled extracts, whichever the freshness requirement calls for.
A nightly work-order extract into append-only ClickHouse snapshots, with a verifier that reads the live Tableau dashboard to prove it shows the newest data.
Read the write-up →Asked by Brisbane teams.
How do you work with teams in Brisbane?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Neither Queensland nor India changes its clocks, so the window stays put all year. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in it. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Do you build for mining and METS companies?+
Yes. Brisbane's mining equipment, technology and services firms need software around their equipment, and that is what we build: backends that accept late and out-of-order data from remote sites, models that predict failures from vibration and temperature readings, offline apps for field crews, and roster and competency tools for contractors. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the problem that costs you most on site.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Brisbane?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Brisbane at around A$102,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work can start within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you can judge us on what ships.
Can you add capacity while we wait for a hire?+
Yes. If a Brisbane role is open and the roadmap is still moving, we can take a defined piece of it now. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or embed one engineer at $5,400 a month. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go and the code sits in your repositories from the first commit, so when your hire starts, they inherit work they can read and extend.
Do we need a data warehouse yet?+
Maybe not. If your reporting runs comfortably against a Postgres read replica, a warehouse adds a second system to pay for and keep in step. The signs you need one: analytical queries slowing the product, data from several sources that has to be joined, or history you must keep that the application overwrites. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.
Why ClickHouse rather than Snowflake or BigQuery?+
Not always. For steady, high-volume analytical work, ClickHouse is fast and cheap to run, self-hosted or on its managed cloud, and we run it in production. Snowflake and BigQuery ask less of you operationally and suit ad hoc querying across a large team. If nobody on your side wants to operate a database, we will recommend the managed option even when the invoice is larger.
What does a freshness guarantee actually mean?+
A written statement per table or report, such as "never more than an hour behind" or "reflects yesterday's close by 07:00". Each one has a check that measures it and an alert that fires when it is missed. Without it, stale data looks exactly like correct data until somebody makes a decision on it.
Can you work with the tools we already have?+
Usually, yes. If you already run dbt, Airflow, Fivetran or a BI tool your team knows, we build inside it. We suggest replacing a tool only when it is the cause of the problem you hired us for, and we show you the evidence before asking you to fund a migration.
How do you handle personal data in the warehouse?+
We decide what should reach the warehouse at all before building the pipeline. Identifiers can be hashed or tokenised at ingestion, sensitive columns restricted by role, and retention enforced by the pipeline itself. Every field is documented from source to dashboard, so anyone can see where a number came from and who can read it.