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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Hybrid
The role
Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will lead the engineering team responsible for Scheduling, one of the most heavily used parts of Deputy. You will lead and grow engineers with a range of experience while helping the team make sound technical decisions and deliver meaningful improvements for customers.
Deputy powers hourly work for more than 1.5 million shift workers across 380,000 workplaces in over 100 countries. Businesses have used the platform to create more than a billion shifts. At the heart of this is Scheduling, where business demand, employee availability, labour costs and compliance come together.
The role combines the complexity of a mature, business-critical product with the opportunity to improve its foundations and shape what comes next. The team is modernising established workflows, improving performance for larger customers and exploring where AI can make scheduling simpler and more effective.
This is a technical engineering leadership role. You will develop a strong understanding of the product and architecture so you can contribute to technical discussions, coach senior engineers and help the team make pragmatic trade-offs. During your first few months, you will spend some time in the codebase and may contribute targeted changes as part of learning the product. Over time, your greatest impact will come through the performance and growth of the team.
Lead the team
Set clear expectations, give useful feedback and coach engineers through their growth, performance and career development.
Build a team culture where people can challenge ideas, learn from mistakes and hold a high bar for each other.
Create clarity when priorities change, surface risks early and help the team maintain a predictable delivery cadence.
Hire thoughtfully as the team grows and reduce single points of failure through cross-skilling and deliberate resourcing decisions.
Shape the technical direction
Develop a deep understanding of the Scheduling product and its architecture so you can contribute meaningfully to technical decisions.
Work with senior engineers to set technical direction and make clear decisions about architecture, frameworks and build-versus-buy trade-offs.
Guide improvements to the performance, reliability, security and maintainability of a multi-tenant product used by businesses around the world.
Stay close to the engineering work through design reviews, architecture discussions, incident learning and targeted proofs of concept.
Deliver customer and business outcomes
Partner closely with Product, Design and Data to turn strategy and customer problems into a focused roadmap with measurable outcomes.
Balance near-term customer value with the technical investment needed to keep Scheduling fast, dependable and ready for enterprise scale.
Keep the team connected to Deputy's goals and explain the context behind priorities and trade-offs.
Help evolve how we build with AI
Use AI-assisted and agentic development tools on real work and form your own view of where they help and where they do not.
Help the team develop effective working practices for machine-drafted code, including review, testing, observability and documentation.
Maintain the quality bar by ensuring that what ships is correct, secure, maintainable and understood by the people who own it.
When the team contributes to customer-facing AI, work with Product and Engineering on evaluation, guardrails, cost, latency and graceful failure.
Must haves
Experience leading engineers, whether as an Engineering Manager or a senior engineer who has taken responsibility for technical direction, delivery and the growth of others. We are open to experienced managers and lead engineers looking to move into their first formal management role.
Strong technical judgement. You can engage deeply in design discussions, challenge assumptions and explain engineering decisions to technical and non-technical leaders.
Experience delivering and operating customer-facing software, including making trade-offs between delivery speed, reliability and long-term maintainability.
A track record of developing engineers through clear expectations, regular feedback and thoughtful coaching.
Experience partnering with Product and Design to shape priorities and deliver outcomes, rather than treating engineering as a queue of work.
First-hand experience with AI development tools. Your opinions are informed by using them, and you can review their output critically.
The ability to create momentum in ambiguous situations by identifying constraints, bringing the right people together and making practical decisions.
Nice to haves
Building and operating distributed, cloud-native or multi-tenant SaaS systems at scale.
Designing for resilience across services, event-driven systems and large relational or NoSQL data stores.
Shipping LLM-backed or agentic capabilities in production.
Working on workforce management, scheduling or another operationally complex product.
Technology experience
We use a mix of languages and tooling, including PHP, Go, Python building on top of AWS. We care more about your technical depth, judgement and ability to learn than an exact match with our current stack.
