Director of Engineering, Product
About Airtasker
Airtasker is Australia's leading platform connecting people who need work done with skilled people who want to do it, from furniture assembly to full home renovations. We are a Sydney-based team building a platform that has facilitated millions of tasks and helped hundreds of thousands of Taskers grow their businesses.
About the role
Two things are happening at Airtasker at once. We are rebuilding the core of the platform, and we are changing how engineering works. This role leads the second one for product engineering.
You shape how the work gets done: how our Engineering Managers lead teams whose members each coordinate a fleet of agents, how engineers plan and review work they no longer type, and how much of our support and bug fixing we hand to agents outright. Your peer Directors lead our tooling and architecture, and you help steer that work from the CTO Leadership Team.
We are well on our way to being an AI-native engineering organisation. We work spec-first, directing autonomous systems that author code and curating the context that makes them effective, and that is how a growing share of the group works today.
The Evidence
On the eight-level agentic maturity scale we use internally, we currently place ourselves at five to six. We are equally honest about where we have stalled. The remaining bottleneck is not model capability, it is us: how we plan, how we hand work to agents, and how much of our systems knowledge still lives only in people's heads.
The Group
Three teams covering acquisition, activation and retention. Around 21 people, five direct reports (three Engineering Managers and two senior engineers), split between Sydney and Hanoi. The teams are full-stack and own their verticals end to end, across backend, web and mobile.
This group is more than half of everyone who writes code at Airtasker. A small number of people carrying a large share of the company's output, which is roughly the point: we would rather have a leader who knows every engineer by name than another layer of management.
You will report to the CTO and sit on the CTO Leadership Team alongside the Director who leads our core marketplace platform, the Director who leads our operational teams across SRE and Data Platform, and the Director who leads decision science. Platform and architecture investment is decided at that table, which is where you make the case for what your teams need.
What you'll do
Work out what engineering management looks like in an agentic team. Coordinating work across people matters less now, and the quality of intent, context and review matters more. You would do that alongside three Engineering Managers who know our teams and our customers well, and feed what you learn back into how we grow and hire engineering leaders. There is no settled playbook for this anywhere yet, which is what makes it the largest part of the role and the hardest.
Change how engineers work with agents. We want one engineer directing a vertical slice end to end, running agents in parallel, with review happening at the plan rather than only at the diff. Getting there means new habits, and habits do not change because a director announced a new process.
Take support and bug fixing off humans. We think a large share of our triage and fixing can be handed to coding agents. Nobody here has proved it yet. You would lead that from hypothesis to production.
Partner with our product and design leaders on how we scope and sequence work. Agentic delivery breaks when intent is vague, and no amount of tooling fixes that upstream.
Bring rigour to how we measure engineering performance. Know where speed is converting into instability and review load rather than into shipped value, and show it with data. Self-reported productivity is not evidence, and we would like a leader who already knows why.
Question our metrics. We currently target 60 merged PRs per engineer per month and 90% of code generated by AI. Both are useful and both are gameable.
Represent product engineering on the CTO Leadership Team, and help set company technical direction.
Hire, and lift the bar through interviewing, guidance and mentorship.
What Hands-On Means Here
You are expected to be fluent enough with a coding agent to reason about our code, our architecture and our systems, and to build enough domain knowledge to join the on-call rotation alongside the other Directors. Shipping code into production is not part of the role, though nobody will stop you if that is what you enjoy.
You break work down into agent-executable units yourself, with clear constraints and acceptance criteria.
You can read a diff properly, and you recognise a well-framed piece of work because you have framed one yourself.
You treat being hands-on as the thing that earns you permission to change how everyone else works.
What a Good First Year Looks Like
In twelve months we would expect:
Our Engineering Managers running teams in a way that would have looked unrecognisable a year earlier.
Most non-trivial work planned, reviewed and merged through agent workflows, with our change failure rate holding.
A meaningful share of inbound bugs resolved without a human writing the fix.
If you got two of those three, we would consider it a good year.
What you'll bring
We care much more about what you have done than how long you have been doing it, so tell us about specific things you have built, fixed or changed rather than years of scope.
Must have
You have led a multi-team engineering group and grown engineering managers within it, and you can point to managers who got better while working for you.
You have taken an engineering organisation through a change that people resisted, and you can describe what you did about the resistance rather than what you announced.
You are hands-on with AI coding tools such as Claude Code across the full lifecycle. You think spec-first, and when agent output goes wrong you fix the upstream artefact rather than patching the symptom.
Strong engineering and architecture fundamentals, and the credibility to guide technical decisions without taking them over.
Based in Sydney, and able to be in the office around twice a week.
Nice to have
You have a point of view on how to run an engineering organisation well. We would welcome you challenging our thinking here.
You treat developer experience as a product, and can give us an example of using metrics to find hidden friction in the inner loop and what you changed to remove it.
Deep care for the product and commercial context, and a habit of coaching rather than directing.
Marketplaces or two-sided platforms.
Scaling delivery through better leverage rather than more headcount.
Working with teams split across time zones.
How We Hire
Four conversations and one short piece of written work. We aim to get you from application to decision in about two weeks, and we will tell you where you stand within two days of each stage.
A conversation with our Talent Acquisition team. Motivation, the shape of the role, location and money, so nothing is a surprise later.
A short written exercise. We send you a real Airtasker problem, lightly redacted, and ask for one to two pages: what you think is going on, and what you would do about it. Two pages is the limit, and telling us what you would do next with more time is part of the answer.
A 90 minute conversation about what you wrote, with our CTO, an Engineering Director and one of our product leaders. We will dig into your reasoning, and part way through we will hand you something new and think about it together.
A technical judgement conversation with two of our senior engineers, who would report to you. No coding, no whiteboard.
A leadership and values conversation with our CTO and a People Partner.
Our People Experience:
Our people team at Airtasker are dedicated to designing an industry leading people experience. This means creating an environment where you are empowered to do your best work and realise the full potential of your skills.
Thriving
Hybrid working - when it comes to working, there’s no “one size fits all” approach, with Airtasker you choose the environment that helps you do your best work.
Airtime - welcome to no Slack and meeting-free Fridays! Airtime is designed so we regularly have dedicated focus time for work and personal growth.
Recharge days - each quarter we have a company-wide Recharge Day, equivalent to 4 additional days of leave per year. It’s a day for everyone when the world can wait and self-care takes centre stage.
Wellbeing support - our Employee Assistance Program provides confidential access for our people to GPs, dieticians, counselling and mental health specialists, providing essential support whenever needed.
Airpowerment Fund - we provide a $200 allowance to spend on anything that supports your health & wellbeing.
Rewarding
Airtasker credits - it’s a great feeling to get things done. Even greater when you get $1000 worth of credits every year to help you check off your to-do list and connect with our community of Taskers.
Fair and equitable pay - this is a core commitment to our people. Every year we review industry data to ensure our compensation framework supports everyone to be recognised for the full value of their skills.
Tenure leave - To celebrate our people’s commitment to Airtasker, we offer tenure leave starting from your 3rd anniversary with the company. This begins with 3 extra days of leave per year, gradually increasing to a maximum of 5 days per year.
Belonging
DAREtasker - join our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee! Every month we meet to create meaningful and impactful programs of work that embrace belonging at Airtasker.
Celebration swap - not everyone celebrates the same things. That’s why, at Airtasker, you can swap national, state or territory public holidays for the ones that matter to you.
Growing
Learning and development - learning at Airtasker is on the job, guided by managers, enhanced by peers and led by ourselves. We deliver learning programs and budget allowances to invest in your growth.
360 performance reviews - feedback is a gift. Every year we run 360 reviews across the business to recognise achievements and promote personal growth.
Volunteer leave - Our team members can take a day each year to lend a helping hand and support a cause they are passionate about.
Celebrating
Awards - and the winners are… our go-getters! Whether it’s our peer-nominated quarterly Values Awards or our periodic Go-Getter Spirit Award, we love celebrating our people and spreading good energy.
Vibe committee - good vibes only! Our Vibe Committee delivers events that hit the sweet spot of bringing us all together to enjoy each other’s company whether you’re local or remote.
Birthday leave - All of our people get an extra day of leave during their birthday week to take time away from work to celebrate.
At Airtasker we believe in culture add - that each person is different and has their own background, learnings and unique experiences that can add to the Airtasker cultural tapestry. We pride ourselves on our inclusive culture, and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.
To all recruitment agencies and talent suppliers: Airtasker does not accept unsolicited resumes. Airtasker is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our job postings or directly to our managers. If you are on our supplier list and have terms in place, ensure you work alongside our internal TA team and do not send resumes directly to managers.
#LI-TR1 #LI-Hybrid