Tech Lead - Hybrid

Link to process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/a71b43ed4bf14d36a45622735566e6bc

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The Engineering Tech Lead owns technical quality, architectural direction, and engineering standards within a product team. This is an ownership role. The Tech Lead is accountable for whether the codebase is getting better, whether architectural decisions hold up over time, and whether engineers are building the right way.

At Sitemate, the Tech Lead works alongside the Engineering Manager and the Product Design Manager (PDM). The PDM owns the what: scope, design, acceptance criteria. The Manager owns the how: capacity, planning, unblocking. The Tech Lead owns technical quality and direction. In practice these overlap constantly and require close collaboration.

The Tech Lead is also a practising engineer. They contribute code, ship features, and lead by example, not from the sidelines. Around half their time goes to technical initiatives: tech debt, platform improvements, and architectural unlocks that make the rest of the team faster.

• Full-time

• Based: Sydney, Australia or Melbourne, Australia

• Remuneration (Including Super): AUD $160,000 - $200,000 pending your experience

   

Sitemate builds best-in-class software and AI agents for the built world, helping construction, infrastructure and industrial companies work smarter and faster. Our mission is to multiply the engineering power of the built world.

Storm is the #1 data capture agent for the front line of the built world - converting audio, photos and videos into clean structured records.

With conversational support in-app and across SMS, Whatsapp and phone calls, Storm is shifting front line workers from paperwork and clunky digital forms, to natural language and multi-channel data capture.

Our core platforms are Dashpivot (safety, quality and field reporting), Gearbelt (fleet and asset management), Flowsite (no-code integrations), and the Sitemate mobile app for every worker on site.

We have strong product-market fit, generating thousands of new leads per month through word of mouth and organic channels. We are backed by Blackbird, with 200 people across 18+ countries and entities in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.

Our core values dictate “how we work”. We believe that basic human values such as honesty, trust and integrity are required to simply ‘get in the door’. Our values are designed to help us determine if an already great person, will be a great fit at Sitemate.

You'll set the technical direction for a team attached to a product. You'll drive RFCs and Decision Logs, make the architectural calls, and be the escalation path when engineers hit something they can't solve.

You'll work across frontend, backend, and mobile: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Angular, MongoDB, and AWS. You don't need to be an expert in all of these, but you're deep enough across the stack to make calls with confidence and defend them.

• Forward Deployed Engineering. You'll ground the team's technical decisions in customer impact and real signals, connecting architectural choices to product outcomes rather than technical elegance. Your job is to provide the guardrails that let the team ship quality features at velocity, not to slow things down in the name of correctness.

• Agentic Engineering. You'll set the technical standards for AI-assisted development in your team: the guardrails, the review patterns, and the quality bar that ensure AI-generated code meets the same production-readiness standard as anything hand-written. Strong foundations matter more in the AI era, because AI amplifies both good and bad codebases and unresolved tech debt now compounds faster than ever.

• Drive Decision Logs and RFCs, and make architectural decisions that balance quality, velocity, and simplicity.

• Hold the line on engineering standards: test coverage, PR quality, deployment practices. Raise the bar on code review both as a reviewer and by coaching others to review well.

• Run technical initiatives end-to-end. Lead the direction, break down and distribute the work, and drive it to completion rather than letting it linger in the background.

• Lead diagnosis of complex, cross-service production issues, and drive improvements to observability, error handling, and logging.

• Act as the technical focal point inside and outside the team, and the escalation path when engineers are stuck.

• Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and informal guidance, building redundancy so there are no single points of failure in knowledge.

• Identify and call out technical risk: debt, scalability, security. Escalate when a risk needs decisions or resources beyond the team.

• Write code and ship features. This is still a hands-on role.

• High technical complexity beneath simple UIs. Shared components run across multiple products, and backend services power both web and mobile clients.

• Split attention. Roughly 50% goes to technical initiatives, with the rest across product delivery, reviews, and mentoring. Deciding what gets your time is a constant judgement call.

• Influence over authority. You set the standards for engineers you don't manage, since people management sits with the Engineering Manager. You get there through credibility and coaching.

• Pace. Fast-Tracked is a real operating value, so you'll need to balance speed with quality and sustainable delivery.

• Organisational maturity. Engineering leadership, frameworks, and career ladders are still being established, so you'll be building the plane while flying it.

• You've built and shipped at scale and want to own technical direction, not just execute against it.

• You want to stay hands-on. This is not a step out of the code.

• You're excited about agentic engineering and want to define the standards for it, not just use the tools.

• You care about mentoring. Helping others grow is as important to you as your own output.

• You're comfortable being the person who says "not like that", and then shows a better way.

• You're drawn to real-world impact. Our users build wind farms, highways, and mines in 100+ countries.

• You want to move into people management. Tech Leads don't have direct reports here, that's the Engineering Manager role. If your goal is 1:1s, performance, and headcount, this is the wrong seat.

• You want to step back from writing code and live in architecture diagrams and reviews. Tech Leads lead from inside the work.

• You optimise for technical elegance over customer outcomes. Architecture here has to earn its keep.

• You see AI tooling as a nice-to-have. Agentic engineering is our direction and Tech Leads are expected to set the bar for it.

• Proven experience building and shipping production software at scale, typically at Senior (L3) level or above

• Track record of owning architectural decisions and technical direction for a team

• Experience setting and enforcing engineering standards across code review, testing, and deployment practice

• Strong debugging ability across services, not just within a single codebase

• Experience mentoring and uplifting other engineers

• Strong product mindset. Thinks about customer outcomes, not just implementation

• Enthusiasm for agentic engineering and AI-first workflows

• Experience running technical initiatives or platform work end-to-end

• Experience writing RFCs or decision records that others actually used

• Deep expertise in TypeScript, React, Node.js, Angular, MongoDB, or AWS

• Mobile development experience

• Experience in a scale-up or high-growth product environment

• MongoDB

• React Native / mobile

• Observability tooling (HyperDX, Datadog, Bugsnag, Sentry)

• Infrastructure as code (CDK, Terraform)

PLEASE Note:

• We hire directly and don’t work with agencies

• TypeScript / JavaScript

• React or Angular

• Node.js

• AWS or a comparable cloud platform