Engineering Manager - Hybrid
Link to process walkthrough:
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📝 Overview
Build What Matters
The Engineering Manager leads the engineering side of a product team, reporting to and supporting their Product General Manager (PGM). They are responsible for the engineers in their team, including their performance, growth, and day-to-day execution, and for making sure work moves from "ready to build" through to "shipped and stable" with high quality and a predictable cadence, including delivering code themselves.
Delivery is shared with the Product Design Manager (PDM). The PDM owns the what: product scope, design, acceptance criteria, and production monitoring. The Manager owns the how: engineering capacity, sprint planning, unblocking engineers, and the quality of the engineering process. Both are jointly accountable for timelines and outcomes. When something slips or ships with issues, neither role can point at the other.
The Manager also works closely with the Tech Lead, who owns technical quality and architectural direction. The Manager focuses on execution and people. The Tech Lead focuses on technical standards and code quality. In practice these overlap and require close collaboration.
Employment:
Full-time
Based: Sydney, Australia or Melbourne, Australia
Remuneration (Including Super): AUD $140,000 - $170,000 pending your experience
About Sitemate
Sitemate builds best-in-class software and AI agents for the built world, helping construction, infrastructure and industrial companies work smarter and faster. Our mission is to multiply the engineering power of the built world.
Storm is the #1 data capture agent for the front line of the built world - converting audio, photos and videos into clean structured records.
With conversational support in-app and across SMS, Whatsapp and phone calls, Storm is shifting front line workers from paperwork and clunky digital forms, to natural language and multi-channel data capture.
Our core platforms are Dashpivot (safety, quality and field reporting), Gearbelt (fleet and asset management), Flowsite (no-code integrations), and the Sitemate mobile app for every worker on site.
We have strong product-market fit, generating thousands of new leads per month through word of mouth and organic channels. We are backed by Blackbird, with 200 people across 18+ countries and entities in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.
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 Sitemate
You'll have direct reports. You'll run 1:1s, progress Sitemate Development Plans and competency matrix levels, set goals, give feedback, and handle performance issues directly. You'll also plan sprint capacity, make sure work is broken into milestones with estimates, track progress, and surface risk before it becomes a problem.
Whilst you won’t be leading a feature or on critical path tickets, our engineering managers still actively contributing code and shipping improvements to our customers - this is not a hands off role. You should be able to follow a design discussion, sense when an estimate is off, and know when "it's nearly done" isn't. You are not expected to own technical architecture, but you are expected to know when to pull the Tech Lead in.
Two shifts are defining what engineering management looks like here:
Forward Deployed Engineering. Teams work closer to customers and ship in tighter loops. Your job is to make sure engineers have real customer signal in front of them, and that the process supports fast iteration rather than adding ceremony to it.
Agentic Engineering. AI is changing what a team of a given size can deliver, which changes how you plan, estimate, and sequence work. You'll need to hold the process standards that keep quality high as throughput goes up, in partnership with the Tech Lead who sets the technical bar.
🔧 Day-to-Day
Plan and manage sprint or cycle capacity, making sure engineers have clear, well-sequenced work broken into milestones with estimates.
Track delivery progress and surface risk or slippage early, rather than waiting for things to go wrong.
Act as the primary escalation path when engineers are stuck, and remove blockers before they stall delivery.
Run regular 1:1s, progress SDPs and competency matrix levels, set goals, and give consistent feedback.
Manage performance issues directly and constructively.
Deliver code yourself. Not as the bulk of your week, but consistently enough to stay sharp and to keep credibility with your team.
Hold the line on engineering process standards such as test coverage, PR quality, and deployment practices, in partnership with the Tech Lead.
Communicate delivery status to stakeholders proactively, and act as the focal point for communication into the engineering team.
Stay aligned with the PDM on priorities, sequencing, and any scope or delivery trade-offs.
Escalate to the PGM when decisions or resources sit beyond the team's control.
⚡ Challenges
Shared accountability. Delivery is shared with the PDM and technical direction sits with the Tech Lead. You'll get results through influence and close collaboration far more than through direct control.
People and delivery pull in opposite directions. Some weeks the sprint wins, some weeks the person does. Judging which is a large part of the job.
Pace. Fast-Tracked is a real operating value, so you'll need to balance speed with quality and sustainable delivery for your team.
Distributed teams across Australia, UK, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Canada. Time zones and async communication are part of the role, not an edge case.
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 managed engineers before, or you've been a Tech Lead or Senior engineer already doing the job unofficially and want to make it official.
You get more satisfaction from a team shipping well than from being the one who shipped it.
You have difficult conversations early rather than letting things drift.
You still write code and want to keep doing it alongside leading a team
You're comfortable owning an outcome jointly with someone else and not needing the final say on everything.
You're drawn to real-world impact. Our users build wind farms, highways, and mines in 100+ countries.
You want to shape how an engineering org works through our next phase of growth, not inherit someone else's playbook.
🚫 Who This Role is Not For
You want to own architecture and technical direction. That sits with the Tech Lead here. If that's what you're after, the Engineering Tech Lead role is the better fit.
You want coding to remain the majority of your job. You'll still ship code here, but it isn't the bulk of the role.
You've moved fully out of engineering. Coding is a reduced part of this job, not an absent one.
You want full Engineering Manager scope with unilateral control over people, process, delivery, and technology. Ours is deliberately narrower.
You manage from a dashboard. This role needs someone in the detail with their team.
You avoid performance conversations or route them straight to HR.
You want a mature engineering org with a VP of Engineering, established ladders, and defined management frameworks already in place. We're building that, which is the opportunity if you want to shape it and a mismatch if you need it to already exist.
🎯 Skills & Tools
Must Have:
Experience managing or leading a team of engineers, with direct reports or clear equivalent responsibility
Strong delivery management across capacity planning, work breakdown, estimation, tracking, and early risk escalation
Current, hands-on coding ability. You'll still be delivering code, and understand best practices
Hands-on background in Javascript / TypeScript, Node.js, Angular or React, MongoDB
Track record of growing engineers through feedback, goal setting, and career development
Willingness to handle underperformance directly and constructively
Comfort operating in shared accountability with product counterparts
Nice to Have:
Experience in a scale-up or high-growth product environment
Experience managing distributed or multi-timezone teams
Experience improving engineering process such as sprint cadence, release process, or on-call
Practical experience with AI-assisted development workflows
Essential Tools:
Jira or an equivalent planning and tracking tool
Confluence or equivalent documentation practice
AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar)
Bonus Tools:
AWS
Observability tooling (Clickstack, Datadog, Bugsnag, Sentry)
PLEASE Note:
We hire directly and don’t work with agencies