Product Engineering Lead – P2P Messaging & API

Tether; City of Brisbane; Remote; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Tether invites a Product Engineering Lead to shape the Keet app and related products. Lead the API and frontend teams, reporting to the CTO, with a 70% engineering leadership and 30% product focus to scale features for a global user base.

You will balance hands-on technical work with strategic product collaboration, driving local-first, distributed systems in a P2P engine without building it from scratch.

Qualifications

• Experience managing engineers or engineering leads who ship consumer product, ideally in chat, calling, or social apps.
• Strong product sense: you can tell a good feature from a busy one.
• Intuition for distributed and local-first systems. Offline-first and eventual consistency should feel natural.
• Deep JavaScript and React.

Responsibilities

• Run the API and frontend teams day to day: unblocking, reviewing, and keeping them shipping.
• Set and hold a high engineering bar for performance, reliability, and clean APIs.
• Own the technical design of features and the API surface between Keet's core and the app.
• Make sure the API team works closely with our deep tech teams on code reviews, design, and anything that touches the engine.
• Work alongside product managers to turn vision and roadmap into scoped, buildable work.
• Push back when scope and reality don't match, and propose better paths when they exist.
• Bring an engineering perspective to product decisions, especially where P2P opens doors that centralized apps can't.
• Help the team move fast, using AI tools and quick prototypes to validate ideas.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Product sense

JavaScript

React

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Tools

APIs

Job description

Tether invites a Product Engineering Lead to shape the Keet app and related products. Lead the API and frontend teams, reporting to the CTO, with a 70% engineering leadership and 30% product focus to scale features for a global user base.

You will balance hands-on technical work with strategic product collaboration, driving local-first, distributed systems in a P2P engine without building it from scratch.