Tech Lead - Hybrid
Link to process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/a71b43ed4bf14d36a45622735566e6bc
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Overview
Build What Matters
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.
Employment:
Full-time
Based: Sydney, Australia or Melbourne, Australia
Remuneration (Including Super): AUD $160,000 - $200,000 pending your experience
About Sitemate
Sitemate builds modern software for construction, infrastructure, and industrial companies - helping teams move faster, work smarter, and deliver with confidence.
Our flagship platform, Dashpivot, transforms manual, paper-based processes into simple, mobile-first digital workflows. Teams use Sitemate every day to capture data in the field, automate reporting, and make better decisions in real time.
Since launching in 2018, we’ve grown from 5 to 150+ people across 18+ countries. We’re backed by Blackbird, Australia and New Zealand’s #1 venture capital firm, and graduated from the Startmate Accelerator. Thousands of companies use Sitemate tools today - with thousands more discovering us each month through strong word-of-mouth and organic growth.
Why Join Sitemate
At Sitemate, you’ll join a global team that values transparency, high velocity, hustle, diversity, and innovation.
We’re open about our metrics, honest about challenges, and obsessed with improving how the world’s most important industries operate. Our environment is flexible, fast-moving, and outcome-driven - designed to help you do the best work of your career.
You’ll be surrounded by people who take pride in their work, care deeply about results, and believe that great culture is built on trust, respect, and continuous learning.
How We Work
Transparency at every level: Monthly Allhands meetings share key company metrics, updates, and customer stories. We also spotlight a team member’s “Life Story” each month - it’s one of the ways we stay connected as a global team.
High velocity, low friction: Our systems are modern and fully integrated, so you’ll spend your time solving problems - not fighting tools.
Performance-driven growth: Seven of our last ten pay increases were made proactively, based on impact and results.
True flexibility: We focus on outcomes, not hours. You’ll have autonomy to manage your time and work where you perform best - with no time monitoring or unnecessary meetings.
Collaboration: You’ll work closely with other teams - engineering, product, design, marketing, and customer success - to move fast and deliver meaningful results.
Sydney HQ perks - rooftop garden, wellness centre, showers, and cycle storage in Haymarket
Melbourne office perks - micro-roasted coffee bar, on-site parking & bike storage, wellness & mothers rooms, opposite Southern Cross station
What We Offer
Competitive, performance-based remuneration
Equity options - own a piece of what you’re helping to build
20 days of paid annual leave, plus sick, carer’s, and compassionate leave
Paid parental leave - 16 weeks for primary carers, 6 weeks for secondary carers (including adoption and stillbirth support)
Professional growth budget and a transparent career development framework
Laptop and home-office setup budget
Flexible work - remote or hybrid, plus the ability to work from anywhere for a few weeks each year
Community & connection - weekly team lunches, global offsites, and our signature “Life Story” sessions
Diversity & Inclusion
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Sitemate welcomes people of all genders, ethnicities, ages, sexualities, and abilities.
55% of our team identify as coming from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, 43% identify as female, and our team spans ages 22-51. We believe our diversity makes us stronger - and we’re committed to creating an environment where everyone can do their best work.
Learn More About Sitemate
Podcasts:
2024: CEO Hartley Pike on scaling Sitemate, diversity, and culture
2022: CTO Tim Bray on building quality features that solve real customer problems
Want to know what it’s like to work at Sitemate? Hear it straight from the team: People of Sitemate
⭐ Read what our customers say: G2 Crowd, Trust Radius
Team Offsites: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
What this role looks like at Tech Lead
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.
Two shifts are defining what technical leadership looks like here:
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.
Day-to-Day
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.
Challenges
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.
Who This Role is For
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.
Who This Role isNotFor
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.
Skills & Tools
Must Have:
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
Nice to Have:
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
Essential Tools:
TypeScript / JavaScript
React or Angular
Node.js
AWS or a comparable cloud platform
Bonus Tools:
MongoDB
React Native / mobile
Observability tooling (HyperDX, Datadog, Bugsnag, Sentry)
Infrastructure as code (CDK, Terraform)
PLEASE Note:
We do not use recruitment partners or services, so please save your time and don't reach out