MongoDB expands Sydney operations to support local growth

MongoDB is expanding its operations in Sydney in a move that comes on the heels of a growing workforce of more than 220 employees in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), a key part of its Asia-Pacific (APAC) business that rakes in revenues of over $220m annually.

Its expanded Sydney office will serve as a hub for MongoDB’s growing engineering, support and go-to-market teams, with a focus on research and development. More than 160 technical roles are currently based in ANZ, working on projects that are shaping the future of data management.

For instance, MongoDB’s technical services engineering team, one of the largest and most tenured teams in Australia, use their deep expertise and experience to help solve complex challenges for some of MongoDB’s largest and most sophisticated global customers.

There are also product teams working on artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tooling and services that are transforming the speed and cost of modernising legacy technologies, a challenge faced by many Australian enterprises.

According to IDC, the ANZ database management systems market will be worth $1.9bn and will grow 17.3% in 2025, but a large portion of software spending in Australia still goes towards maintaining outdated systems that are expensive, risky and impede the development of modern use cases such as AI, a challenge which MongoDB is addressing.

For example, tools built in Sydney, such as Relational Migrator, had helped Bendigo and Adelaide Bank modernise a core banking app with 90% less development time and one-tenth the cost of traditional legacy systems migration.

The company’s core engineering team, which has a presence in Australia, also develops and maintains the MongoDB server storage layer that’s crucial to the experience of the millions of global users of MongoDB.

“Legacy technology is holding back global innovation, which is why we are on a mission to eliminate roadblocks to groundbreaking technology like AI by bringing simplicity, speed and ease to the modernisation process for Australia’s leading companies,” said Simon Eid, senior vice-president for APAC at MongoDB. “Local pilot projects and the fantastic AI tooling built by our Australian team are part of the template that is being rolled out globally.”

The new MongoDB office in Sydney, on 201 Elizabeth Street, is designed to enable MongoDB’s flexible working model that encourages employees to work how and where best suits them and the business. The office has a range of fixed and flexible desks, which allows employees to adapt the tasks and teams they’re working with on a given day. The office also has a number of multi-use spaces that can be used for events.

“Databases are the backbone of modern applications – managing, storing and protecting massive volumes and varieties of data. But it’s a giant technical challenge to do that at scale while offering the great developer experience MongoDB is famous for,” said Mick Graham, vice-president of engineering at MongoDB. 

“The outstanding technical talent we’ve been able to find and develop in Australia has been absolutely crucial to the company’s success and continued growth,” Graham added. “Working on foundational technology like databases is an incredibly exciting area of development. It’s so gratifying to see how the teams’ work is impacting thousands of customers across the world and particularly here in Australia.”