General Manager of Software Engineering

Role overview

An established, award-winning SaaS company in Sydney is seeking a senior engineering leader to strengthen the foundations, governance, and leadership structure of its platform as it enters its next stage of growth. The business has been operating for 15 years, employs around 250 people, and works in a complex, highly regulated environment.

This appointment is focused on making engineering operate as a stable, secure, scalable function that supports a product-led future. The right person will help shift the organisation away from reactive, customer-request-driven work and toward a more disciplined platform model.

What the role will focus on

• Taking ownership of how the platform is designed, built, operated, and improved over time.
• Introducing consistent engineering standards, structure, governance, and day-to-day working practices across multiple teams and disciplines.
• Setting clear technical direction and applying priorities and trade-offs consistently as business demands change.
• Remaining closely connected to architecture, platform strategy, and technical decision-making while not being a day-to-day coding contributor.
• Keeping technical debt visible, understood, and actively managed so scalability is protected.
• Improving release frequency, delivery reliability, prioritisation, and quality so engineering delivers what it commits to.
• Creating a stronger operating rhythm with Product and Delivery, with clear ownership and shared prioritisation discipline.
• Reducing bespoke customer-specific work entering engineering by default and helping the wider business make better short-term versus long-term trade-offs.
• Leading through the engineering leadership layer, including an Engineering Manager, Team Leads, and senior specialists.
• Strengthening accountability, consistency, career progression, and capability development across engineering.
• Helping define how the function should be organised as the business scales, including future operating model and team design.
• Contributing to Senior Leadership Team decisions and ensuring engineering considerations are reflected in company direction.

Experience and capability sought

The ideal candidate will bring leadership experience from a B2B SaaS, scale-up, or similarly platform-led environment, with accountability for delivery, reliability, platform performance, and long-term technical sustainability.

You should have a clear record of guiding an organisation from services-led, request-driven delivery into a more scalable, product-led platform model.

This role suits someone who has built engineering into a more coherent function through standards, structure, and consistent ways of working, and who has successfully scaled teams while lifting maturity without slowing the business unnecessarily.

Strong judgement around organisation design, capability growth, operating model evolution, and balancing speed with quality is essential. You will also need the executive credibility to partner effectively with Product and Delivery, and the confidence to hold the line when commercial pressure pulls engineering toward short-term work.

The role calls for architectural and platform oversight, familiarity with modern cloud-based SaaS environments, and working knowledge of practices such as CI/CD.

This is a leadership role for someone who builds scalable teams and systems rather than being the person every issue is routed to. Clear, direct communication and the ability to demonstrate what changed and what improved are also important.

Why this opportunity stands out

This is a genuine chance to define engineering in a business that has already achieved scale and now wants to grow with discipline rather than drift.

You will work directly with the CEO and Senior Leadership Team, helping move the company from services-led delivery to product-platform scale. You will shape the engineering operating model from the ground up, coach and develop a strong leadership layer, and create the structure and clarity needed for the platform to evolve sustainably.

The existing team is already established, including an Engineering Manager, Team Leads, developers, QA capability, a Staff Platform Engineer, a Principal Engineer, and cloud engineering support. The opportunity is therefore to lead capable people, introduce the right structure, and make a lasting impact without unnecessary bureaucracy.

AI is expected to become part of the future platform strategy, although the immediate focus is on foundations, scalability, technical leadership, and operating model maturity.

Additional information

• The role is based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
• The position is full time and onsite.
• The company is described as Australian, award-winning, 15 years old, and around 250 staff strong.
• The business operates in a complex and highly regulated domain.
• The immediate priorities are engineering foundations, scalability, technical leadership, and operating model maturity.
• The team already includes an Engineering Manager, Team Leads, developers, QA capability, a Staff Platform Engineer, a Principal Engineer, and cloud engineering support.
• AI is likely to be part of the future platform strategy.