For more than a decade, Felix Barbalet sat inside the machinery of the federal government. Working across agencies like Treasury, he saw firsthand a recurring systemic failure where technology projects were routinely oversold and underdelivered.
As public servants weigh up voluntary redundancies that began across multiple departments and agencies since the start of 2026, Mr Barbalet's career path offers a pragmatic blueprint for life on the other side.
"My advice, if anyone asked me, would be don't quit your job until you know that you know you can pay your mortgage and all those things," he said.
His exit from the public service in 2021 was calculated and methodical.
While still in the service, he moved to part time hours, using the stability of his government salary to test his business ideas.
He started validating ideas early by talking to people, a lesson reinforced after his first product following his departure from the public service failed to attract customers.
He eventually stepped away, not to abandon public service, but to solve a problem the bureaucracy couldn't; by making sense of how taxpayer money is actually spent.
Mr Barbalet worked in both a heavily funded start-up and at Qantas, where he ran a software engineering team after he officially left the service. The contrasts were revealing.
Qantas felt like "a big bureaucracy" not unlike the public sector.
"I thought it was going to be a private-sector organisation, and that it would be different from the public sector, but actually they're both big bureaucracies, and so I saw similar kinds of things on both sides," Mr Barbalet said
Meanwhile, the start-up, despite raising more than $100 million, lacked the governance and leadership maturity he expected.
That experience led to an unexpected perspective that if large players could be this messy, maybe a small, values driven company really could build something better.
That "something better" became AwardedTenders, a platform born from a simple frustration.
The spark came from a friend in New Zealand, who was selling to the government and simply wanted to know who else was selling to the same department.
When a colleague tried to track procurement activity via AusTender, they found it nearly impossible to get an aggregate view.
Initially, Mr Barbalet built a simple Google dashboard. His friend became the first customer, and AwardedTenders was born.
Running a business, however, meant a steep learning curve.
"I'm still learning. I have an economics degree, but as a software engineer running a business, there's so many other things you need to learn about accounting, sales, marketing and customer service," Mr Barbalet said.
The paradox of Australian procurement was that while the federal data was among the best in the world, it was effectively locked behind legacy systems and internal facing priorities.
The Department of Finance had improved raw data quality, but a glaring gap remained in helping suppliers and the public actually make sense of outcomes.
The AwardedTenders platform helps small businesses identify who actually won the contracts they applied for, in addition to other information they often failed to obtain directly from agencies.
The transition was not a clean break. In 2022, Mr Barbalet returned to full-time employment, continuing to build AwardedTenders at night and on weekends, with the support of a very patient partner.
It was a grind of day jobs and side projects, fueled by feedback from users who were finally seeing through the "procurement black hole".
Operating out of Canberra, Mr Barbalet sat at an odd crossroads.
While local policy often tried to diversify the city away from "government facing" work, his mission was to make the government more transparent.
"I'd like to see the government be better at delivering services for our most needy citizens, and yeah, I think there's still lots and lots of work that needs to happen to make Australia better," he said
For public servants who are considering their own "machinery" exit, Barbalet's story proves that leaving the service did not have to mean abandoning public purpose; it just meant finding a more effective way to deliver it.
