Head of Engineering

Location: 3 days/week in North Sydney Office

Package: Up to $250,000 + Bonus + Super

The Opportunity:

This rapidly scaling AI SaaS company is hiring a world-class Head of Engineering to lead the next phase of platform growth.

A multi-year scale-up is underway. The brief is clear: scale engineering capacity, strengthen the platform, and lift delivery standards as the product expands from individual capabilities into a broader platform and ecosystem.

This is not a caretaker role. Your mandate is to set the engineering cadence, shape the architecture, and define how the team ships, measures quality, and maintains reliability as complexity increases. Hiring, technical direction, and the operating model will directly influence speed to market, resilience at scale, and CX.

Leadership Scope and Business Context:

• The remit covers the customer-facing platform and product capabilities.
• A dedicated AI/ML team (9 people) owns the core LLM platform. A close partnership is essential, but this role does not run model development.
• The engineering team is currently lean (circa 10 people), so the role starts in player-coach mode with a clear runway to double in size within the next 12 months.
• The core application is built on Ruby on Rails. AI capabilities are integrated via APIs into a separate Python-based AI platform.

What you’ll do:

• Set engineering direction and translate it into clear standards, priorities, and execution plans.
• Build and lead a high-performing engineering function, hiring well, developing talent, and creating accountability across delivery.
• Lift delivery maturity, planning, quality gates, release confidence, incident management, and continuous improvement.
• Evolve platform architecture for growth, reliability, and extensibility, including assessing what needs to change for the next stage.
• Improve operational maturity across observability, resilience, and secure, scalable cloud delivery patterns.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and AI/ML to integrate AI safely, reliably, and at scale.

What we’re looking for:

• 10+ years of Senior engineering leadership in modern SaaS, with a track record of scaling teams and systems.
• Strong technical judgement across distributed systems, cloud architecture, reliability engineering, and secure delivery.
• Comfortable operating hands-on early in a smaller team, with the leadership range to scale the function over time.
• Experience leading customer-facing platforms that integrate AI capabilities, without needing to own the underlying model platform.
• C-Suite level communication and strong commercial awareness, able to simplify trade-offs and drive alignment.

Apply now or reach out for more info:

📧 [email protected]

🔗 George Bates | LinkedIn