Principal / Lead Software Engineer

Obzervr; Brisbane; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Obzervr in Brisbane is seeking a Lead Engineer to guide our Engineering team on a hybrid basis. This full-time, hands-on leadership role involves design reviews, coaching, and setting how engineers work with AI coding agents.

You will report to the Engineering Manager, with a dotted line to the Founder for technical direction. You will co-author engineering principles and help keep our field-work management platform correct, maintainable, performant and secure, with a focus on scalable cloud,

Qualifications

• Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple production systems.
• Experience with AI coding agents and reviewing output.
• Strong design fundamentals: API, data design, security and performance.
• Ability to work in short cycles, seek feedback and adapt.
• Experience with cloud-based, multi-tenant B2B SaaS is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across platform areas: cloud SaaS, mobile app, and integration engines.
• Review complex PRs and designs, including AI-generated changes.
• Spend 20-30% of time hands-on building and solving hard problems.
• Co-author and apply engineering principles with leadership teams.
• Coach engineers to grow design and review skills.
• Define how engineers direct and review AI coding agents.

Skills

Technical leadership

AI coding agents

Code reviews coaching

Software design fundamentals

CI/CD & testing

Hands-on development

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Node/TypeScript

Angular

Cloudflare Workers

Azure

.NET/C#

Azure SQL

Job description

We are seeking a Lead Engineer to join our Engineering team in Brisbane on a hybrid basis. This is a full-time, hands-on building and technical leadership role with no direct reports. You will guide our engineers through collaborative design, code review and coaching. You report to the Engineering Manager, with a dotted line to the Founder for technical direction. You will co-author our engineering principles and set how engineers work with AI coding agents. You will also help keep our field work management platform correct, maintainable, performant and secure, and flexible.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across our three platform areas:
• the multi-tenant cloud SaaS platform
• the offline-first mobile app and its synchronisation
• the integration and automation engines that connect to customer ERP systems
• Design solutions with engineers while they build them, and shape significant changes together.
• Review complex pull requests and designs across our codebases, including AI-written changes. Apply and improve the PR Ownership and Code Review Guidance.
• Spend 20-30% of your time hands-on building. This covers 1-2-week dives into hard problems, such as mobile performance, and foundation work in new areas and technologies.
• Co-author, maintain and apply the engineering principles with the Founder, Product and the Engineering Managers.
• Coach and pair with engineers to grow their design and review skills and give the Engineering Manager input on how engineers are performing.
• Set and model how engineers direct and review AI coding agents, so that every merged change has a person who understands it and can defend it.
• Identify, size and prioritise technical debt with Product, and make the business case for it.
• Build integration patterns so a new ERP connector takes weeks of work.
• Support weekly Preview and Primary releases through CI/CD, automated and integration testing, and resilience patterns.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated technical leadership in at least two of the following, and the drive to build experience in the third:
• Global, multi-tenant B2B SaaS on public cloud, built to scale
• Mobile apps on Android, iOS or Windows with offline-first data and distributed synchronisation
• Integration and automation engines connecting to back-end systems such as ERP over HTTP, webhooks and REST APIs, in real-time and batch modes, cloud-to-cloud
• Several years of professional software engineering across multiple production systems. No formal qualification is required.
• Built and shipped production software in several technology stacks, with evidence of becoming effective quickly in unfamiliar ones.
• Has started working with AI coding agents, in a current role or on their own initiative, and critically reviews, corrects and rejects their output.
• Strong design fundamentals: domain modelling, API and data design, testing strategy, security and performance.
• Reviews code and designs in a way that improves the engineer as well as the change.
• Backs technical opinions with data and explains trade-offs in business terms to technical and non-technical people.
• Works in short cycles, asks for help early, seeks and acts on feedback, and changes position when the evidence changes.
• Nice to have (any of): B2B SaaS experience, Field service, maintenance, mining or industrial domain experience, ERP or EAM integration, such as SAP, Pronto, JD Edwards or Dynamics 365, Offline-first mobile apps and data sync, Node/TypeScript, Angular and Cloudflare Workers, Azure, .NET/C# and Azure SQL