Engineering Manager - Hybrid

Link to process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/998cee75254c42f3a7d2ddb61f664513

👋 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 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 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 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