Are you a Lead Engineer who lives at the intersection of AI and real-world impact, and wants to build technology that actually changes how organisations perform? We’d love to hear from you!

About Acorn PLMS: At Acorn PLMS, we are on a mission to transform the corporate learning experience. Our cutting-edge Performance Learning Management System (PLMS) software is powered by AI and designed to ensure that what people learn directly contributes to their exceptional performance in business. Corporate learning needs a revolution, and Acorn PLMS is the antidote. We are the only solution that guides learners step by step to master the specific capabilities required for their roles, ultimately accelerating organisational performance.

About the role: Are you a forward-thinking AI enabled engineer with a passion for building scalable software and AI-powered solutions? We’re looking for a Lead Engineer to join our Engineering team in Sydney or Canberra, Australia, and help shape the future of intelligent learning technology.

At Acorn, our Lead Engineer is a recognised technical expert within the Engineering team, responsible for driving complex and high-impact initiatives across our platform. Operating at a senior level, this role shapes architectural direction, AI capability, and engineering standards that influence multiple teams and the broader business. Based in Sydney or Canberra, our Lead Engineer will combine deep hands-on expertise with leadership through influence - mentoring engineers, guiding technical decision-making, and ensuring our AI-powered solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned to Acorn’s mission of connecting learning to real performance outcomes.

5 Key Capabilities

The best part… we use our Acorn software at Acorn. We believe in the power of our Managers and Staff being aligned on the 5 capabilities needed for each role, and the level that we expect for any given role, using our Acorn AI tool to streamline this consistently across our business. The 4 levels comprise Foundational, Developing, Proficient and Advanced.

Here are the 5 capabilities for our Lead Engineer to give you an idea of what the role entails, and the level we are looking for from it:

1. Cross-Functional Influence and Stakeholder Alignment: Influence cross-functional stakeholders and align priorities to sustain shared roadmaps that deliver measurable business outcomes. Translate complex technical decisions into clear business implications to broker trade-offs, secure commitment, and unblock delivery while managing risk. Level: Proficient — At the proficient stage, you align product, design, data, and operations on platform outcomes without authority. You translate choices into value, broker trade-offs. Roadmaps stick, dependencies clear, and releases ship.
2. Engineering Quality, Reliability and Security: Define and uphold engineering standards for quality, reliability and security to deliver resilient, trustworthy products that safeguard customer trust and reduce business risk. Level: Advanced — At the advanced stage, you set and champion quality, reliability and security across Acorn PLMS, run incident drills. You embed testing, monitoring; coaching and metrics lift stability, recovery and trust.
3. Mentorship and Capability Uplift: Diagnose and uplift engineering capability to raise quality, resilience, and delivery performance across the organisation. Level: Proficient — At the proficient stage, you lead cross-squad mentoring—diagnosing gaps, setting standards, and running pairing and reviews. You define pathways and track outcomes to lift capability, advise adjacent teams, accelerate delivery.
4. Platform Architecture and Data/AI Strategy: Define and govern platform architecture and data and AI strategy to deliver scalable, secure, and ethical capabilities that provide reliable insights and drive measurable product and business outcomes. Level: Proficient — At the proficient stage, you lead platform and data/AI design for a product area. You set standards and guide teams. You balance scale, security, cost and ethics to improve results.
5. Programme Leadership and Delivery at Scale: Lead and orchestrate complex, cross-team programmes to convert strategy into outcomes and enable delivery at scale. Align execution, manage risk and dependencies, and safeguard quality and security to deliver predictable value on time and within budget. Level: Advanced — At the advanced stage, you lead cross-team delivery from strategy to outcomes. You shape roadmaps, coach teams and partners, align architecture and execution, manage dependencies, risk, protecting quality, deadlines, budget.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact engineering initiatives, particularly across AI-driven features and platform capabilities.
• Shape and evolve system architecture to ensure scalability, reliability, performance, and security across Acorn’s SaaS platform.
• Act as the technical authority for AI solutions, including large language model (LLM) integration, experimentation frameworks, prompt engineering practices, and responsible AI governance.
• Drive technical strategy within the Engineering team, influencing tooling, frameworks, DevOps practices, and long-term architectural decisions.
• Set and uphold engineering standards, code quality benchmarks, and best practices to ensure maintainable and high-performing systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, and Customer-facing teams to translate business requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions.
• Mentor and coach engineers across levels (IC1–IC3), playing a key role in onboarding, technical uplift, and knowledge sharing across teams.
• Lead technical discovery and decision-making for ambiguous or complex problems, clearly articulating trade-offs and recommendations to stakeholders.

Experience and qualifications:

• Proficient and experienced in AI-first workflows, embracing the new programming paradigm of letting AI perform most of the coding while reviewing the generated code in detail for structure and correctness.
• High level of knowledge in system design and clean code architecture and practices
• Extensive experience in software engineering within a B2B SaaS environment, with demonstrated ownership of complex systems and architectural design.
• Strong practical experience designing and implementing AI/ML-powered solutions, including integration of LLMs or AI services into production-grade applications.
• Deep proficiency in modern backend and/or frontend technologies, cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS, Azure, or GCP), and scalable distributed systems.
• Strong in automated testing practices and able to independently ship high quality code confidently in production.
• Proven ability to operate with high autonomy, make strategic technical decisions, and influence engineering direction across multiple teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading through influence, contributing to capability uplift without formal line management responsibility.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in software engineering, with two years leading an engineering team/squad
• Education: Degree in Computer Science or related field
• PHP and React: Experience with both is preferred
• Front-End Development: Proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Location

We are open to individuals based in Sydney or Canberra, Australia. We are an office-first company, meaning we work from our local offices the majority (if not all) of the time. We want to create cool stuff with great people, and we know from experience that is best done through daily moments like the coffee run, walk to grab lunch, or quick huddles. Being able to capitalise on this is key to our ongoing success and a large part of the reason we can work at the pace we do. Please note candidates will need to be in commuting distance to our offices based in Sydney or Canberra CBD. 

Applicants must have full working rights in Australia to be considered for this role.

Compensation

One of our core values is transparency and we believe in being upfront with candidates throughout the recruitment process, to make sure expectations are aligned. This role sits within a salary range of $145,000 - $204,000 + 12% superannuation contribution, commensurate with experience and qualifications. 

Our recruitment process

Acorn is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and respected. We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all qualified candidates. We aim to ensure that our recruitment process is fair and accessible to everyone and encourage candidates to request any accommodations needed during the application or interview stages.

About Acorn

Acorn is the hub for learning and performance for over 1 million active learners globally. The work you do - whether that’s writing lines of code, designing the layout of a dashboard, or talking to customers - helps real people grow not just professionally, but personally. In the space of 10 years, we’ve grown to a global platform in the heart of many major organisations’ ecosystems. There’s still so much more to do, and we need people who are keen to help us journey into the next phase on board! And since we’re still growing, there’s so much you can learn on that journey with us.

Want to see more about life at Acorn? Check out our video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BGUk-n3FrQ

To find out more about Acorn, our Values and working with us, check out our website at https://acorn.works/about