Tech Lead - Hybrid

Sitemate; Australia; Hybrid; AUD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive remuneration

Equity options

20 days annual leave

Paid parental leave (16 weeks)

Job summary

Sitemate is seeking an Engineering Tech Lead to own technical quality, architectural direction, and engineering standards within a product team. This is an ownership, hands-on role collaborating with the Engineering Manager and Product Design Manager.

You will contribute code, ship features, and lead by example. About half of your time goes to tech debt, platform improvements, and architectural unlocks to accelerate the team.

Qualifications

• Must have experience building and shipping production software at scale (Senior level or above).
• Proven track record owning architectural decisions and technical direction.
• Experience setting engineering standards across code review, testing, and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Drive RFCs and Decision Logs; set architectural direction balanced for quality and velocity.
• Maintain and enforce engineering standards across the team; improve testing and deployment practices.
• Lead technical initiatives end-to-end; mentor engineers; drive observability and incident response improvements.
• Write code and ship features; stay hands-on while guiding the team.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks like debt, scalability, and security.

Skills

Senior level ownership

Architectural decisions

Engineering standards

Debugging across services

Mentoring engineers

Product mindset

Agentic engineering

Job description

Link to process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/a71b43ed4bf14d36a45622735566e6bc

Thanks for stopping by and learning more about this role at Sitemate!

We'd love to hear from you

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 is the front line AI company for the built world. We build software and AI agents for construction, engineering, manufacturing, and energy companies, helping field teams capture work as it happens and the business turn that activity into structured, auditable records. The Sitemate platforms include Dashpivot, Gearbelt, the Sitemate App, and Flowsite, and Sitemate’s AI agent is called Storm.

Storm is our AI agent layer, working underneath Dashpivot, Gearbelt, the Sitemate App, and Flowsite to turn what happens on-site into structured, auditable records.

We’ve achieved strong product-market fit - generating thousands of new monthly leads through word-of-mouth and organic marketing alone.

Backed by Blackbird, Australia and New Zealand’s #1 venture capital firm, and a graduate of the Startmate Accelerator, Sitemate has grown from 5 people in 2018 to over 150 across 18+ countries. Our team blends deep industry experience with cutting-edge product design to build tools that modernise one of the world’s largest and most essential industries.

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.

Our Core Values

Our core values dictate “how we work”. We believe that basic human values such as honesty, trust and integrity are required to simply ‘get in the door’. Our values are designed to help us determine if an already great person, will be a great fit at Sitemate.

• Handle with Care: Handle with thought and care, decisions are considered and consciously delivered
• Everything Engineered: Everything engineered, intentional, planned and systematic
• Quality Certified: Do it well, with attention to detail and accuracy, or don’t do it at all
• Fast Tracked: Fast, incremental, and constant delivery of change
• High Vis: A high visibility, transparent and open environment
• Rain, Hail or Shine: Show up for your team, your customers and yourself

Learn more about our values:

• Read:
  • On Sitemate's Values, Culture and DNA
• Listen:
  • Unleashing your Zilla
  • On scaling Sitemate, diversity, and culture

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
• 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

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
• 2023: CMO Lance Hodgson on accelerating your career
• 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 is Not For

• 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