Hiring // Forward Deployed Engineers // Sydney Get in touch ↓

FDE Sydney // Applying as a pair

Rob & Gareth

We're Rob Balfre and Gareth Hughes, applying together for the Sydney FDE role. We shipped together at Corporate Travel Management ten years ago. Now that agents have changed how fast software gets built, we want to find out how fast we can ship together again. 

$ cat hiring/pair.txt
01  ROB BALFRE     AI LEAD // CTM
02  GARETH HUGHES  SR EM // MYPASS
    CITY           SYDNEY
    SHIPPED        CTM // 2015–16

01 // The Pair

Who We Are

Rob Balfre

AI Lead, Corporate Travel Management (ASX: CTD)

robertbalfre.devgithub.com/rob-balfredryui.dev

I went from full-stack dev to AI lead at Corporate Travel Management, where I run a team of developers across three time zones building internal tools and client products with agents. I scrapped our basic AI assistant and rebuilt it as a fully agentic travel assistant in four months; it's now rolling out globally to all our clients.

I also move between teams teaching engineers to build with agents, and I've taken several proofs of concept into production, from email automation to client reporting, which helped keep clients worth millions. I moved us off Copilot to Claude Code and Codex, set up human-in-the-loop PR review and CI that holds up, and talked leadership out of expensive "AI" SaaS by showing a lean model could do the same job for a fraction of the cost.

Gareth Hughes

Senior Engineering Manager, MyPass Global

garethhughes.devgithub.com/garethrhughessquirrelnotes.appgarethhughes.dev/fragile

I lead six multi-discipline teams (about 30 people) across platform, data and product, spread across Sydney, the Philippines and India. I lead through managers, most of whom I hired or promoted, and they now run the engineering practices I introduced.

I also lead the work with enterprise customers. I ran discovery with BHP, then designed the integrations, API specs and delivery plan behind an A$6M to A$8M ARR partnership, and did the same with Transport for NSW as Technical Director at Helium.

Outside work I build with agents daily. Squirrel Notes is a zero-knowledge encrypted notes app with paying subscribers, built with Claude Code, with its own MCP server and encrypted agent memory. Fragile is a DORA analytics platform on Jira, with its own MCP server, now used internally at MyPass.

02 // Why a Pair

We've Shipped Together Before

Ten years ago, when Gareth was also at CTM, we built hotel data consolidation tools together, shipping fast long before agents could help. We've stayed close since. These days we meet for coffee before work to argue about the best ways to build with AI and compare the MCP servers, skills and enterprise workflows we're each shipping. Now that agents have changed how fast software gets built, we want to find out how fast we can ship together again.

03 // Why We Want to Be in the Room

The Hard Part Isn't the Tooling

It's getting experienced engineers to trust agents and getting leaders to back the change. We each cover one side.

Engineers // Rob

Trust in agents

Rob teaches engineers to build with agents and sets up the review and CI that make the output safe to ship.

Leaders // Gareth

Backing for the change

Gareth turns what executives want into work engineers can build, and keeps both sides agreed on scope as it moves.

We'd like to do that with customers like Westpac and feed what we learn back into Amp core.

04 // Get in Touch

Talk to Us