Frontend development in Brisbane
Government services in Queensland have to work for every Queenslander: someone in Brisbane on fibre, someone in a remote community on a weak mobile signal, someone using a screen reader, someone for whom English is a second language. The frontends that fail usually fail the same people, and the agency hears about it through complaints rather than analytics.
We build React and Next.js frontends for agencies and their suppliers that start from those users. Pages that load quickly on a slow connection, forms in plain language that save progress, accessibility built into every component, and error messages that tell people what to do next. We test with screen readers and throttled networks as we go, so the person on a weak signal in a remote town gets the same service as the person in the city.
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.
We measure on real devices and real traffic first, not a lab score on a fast laptop. The fix is usually less JavaScript: a smaller bundle, images sized for the screen, and third-party scripts that stop blocking the first render.
A procurement checklist, a customer complaint, or a letter from a lawyer. We fix the causes rather than the line items: real buttons, labelled forms, focus that lands somewhere sensible, and automated checks in CI so it stays fixed.
Global state that everything reads, no types, and three versions of the same modal. We add TypeScript file by file, put tests on the flows that make money, and move shared pieces into one component library as screens are touched.
Usually for search visibility or first-load speed. We move it route by route behind the same URLs, so the old app keeps serving while the new one takes over, and nobody has to sign off a risky weekend cut-over.
A Next.js web app with five operational dashboards and Tableau reports rendered in place, without a second login.
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 to move to Next.js?+
Not always. If the app sits behind a login and nobody finds it through search, a well-built React single-page app on Vite is simpler to host and easier to reason about. Next.js earns its keep when first load and search visibility matter, or when you want rendering close to the data. We will tell you which case you are before anyone rewrites a route.
Can you work from our Figma files?+
Yes, and we will ask questions about them. Designs rarely show the loading state, the empty state, the error, or what happens when a name is twice as long as the mock-up assumed. We raise those early and propose something, rather than inventing it quietly in code and leaving your designer to find out in review.
Will you build us a design system?+
We will build the one your product needs, which is usually smaller than people expect: design tokens, the components you actually use, and Storybook to show them. We extract it from the screens you already have rather than designing it in isolation, because a component library nobody migrates to is just a second way of doing things.
How do you handle accessibility?+
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA by default, test with a keyboard and a screen reader, and run automated checks in CI so regressions are caught before they ship. Automated tools find only part of the problem, so we also test the key journeys by hand: sign-up, checkout, and anything a user does every day.
Do you only do the front end, or the API as well?+
Either. A lot of front-end pain is really an API shaped for a different screen, and when that is the case we can fix both sides. If your backend team owns the API, we write down what the front end needs from it and agree the contract with them, rather than working around it in the browser.