Frontend development in Melbourne
A Melbourne university's student portal serves someone enrolling from overseas on a phone, a mature-age student juggling work, and a student using a screen reader, often in the same week of enrolment. Most of the complaints we hear about student systems are really about frontends: confusing enrolment flows, timetables that break on a phone, and forms that time out halfway through.
We build React and Next.js frontends for universities and education providers that sit on top of the systems you already run. Enrolment flows in plain English, timetables and results that work on any phone, accessibility built into the component library, and performance tested on slow connections. We design for the student who is least familiar with Australian university life, because everyone else then finds it easy.
Melbourne's software market is built on products rather than projects. SEEK, REA Group and MYOB run from the city, Culture Amp started here, and a generation of engineers learned their trade inside marketplaces and SaaS businesses that sell well beyond Australia. The SaaS companies we hear from have usually found their market and are now paying for early decisions: a data model that assumed one customer type, permissions that started as a role column, and infrastructure in a single region when their newest customers are in the US or Europe.
Health and education are the other two pillars. The Melbourne Biomedical Precinct around Parkville brings together hospitals, research institutes, biotech firms and universities, and they need registries, trial platforms, patient apps and operational tools that handle sensitive records carefully and still suit a busy clinician between patients. The universities (Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and the rest) run student systems, learning platforms and research data at a scale that rarely fits off-the-shelf software, and their students judge every portal against the apps on their phones. And the Port of Melbourne keeps a large freight and logistics industry busy, much of it still run on email and spreadsheets.
Hiring costs a little less than in Sydney. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at A$109,570, from 329 reported salaries, and the engineers who have already scaled a product are the ones every scale-up wants at the same time. A platform problem can sit on the roadmap for quarters while that hire is found. 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, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people, and the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the work stays readable long after the engagement ends.
We are the right fit for a platform problem your product team has no time for, a defined piece of work with a clear end, or the months before your own hires start. Senior engineers arrive within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two weeks, and agencies 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 Melbourne teams.
How do you work with teams in Melbourne?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window, so your mornings stay with your own people. 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 Melbourne SaaS and marketplace companies?+
Yes, and it is the work Melbourne asks for most. We untangle data models that assumed one customer type, turn a role column into proper permissions, add single sign-on and a second region for the first large overseas customer, and tune search and messaging for marketplaces that have outgrown their first version. We work inside your codebase, alongside your product engineers, starting with whatever is slowing them down most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Melbourne?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at around A$110,000. 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 work white-label for a Melbourne agency?+
Yes. If your agency wins more build work than your developers can carry, we work under your name. Your client sees your team and your process, we join calls as your engineers, and the code goes into your client's repositories from the first commit. You keep the client relationship. An NDA is signed before you share anything specific, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
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.