About this Engineering Manager - Hybrid role at Sitemate
Link to process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/998cee75254c42f3a7d2ddb61f664513
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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.
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.
This is a Sitemate-specific role and it is deliberately narrower than a typical Engineering Manager. Think Delivery Manager and Engineering Lead combined, with delivery shared with the PDM and technical direction carved out to the Tech Lead. Set this framing with candidates early, because it is the single most common source of mismatch.
Employment:
Full-time
Based: Sydney, Australia or Melbourne, Australia
Remuneration (Including Super): AUD $140,000 - $170,000 pending your experience
About Sitemate
Sitemate builds modern software for construction, infrastructure, and industrial companies - helping teams move faster, work smarter, and deliver with confidence.
Our flagship platform, Dashpivot, transforms manual, paper-based processes into simple, mobile-first digital workflows. Teams use Sitemate every day to capture data in the field, automate reporting, and make better decisions in real time.
Since launching in 2018, we’ve grown from 5 to 150+ people across 18+ countries. We’re backed by Blackbird, Australia and New Zealand’s #1 venture capital firm, and graduated from the Startmate Accelerator. Thousands of companies use Sitemate tools today - with thousands more discovering us each month through strong word-of-mouth and organic growth.
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.
How We Work
Transparency at every level: Monthly Allhands meetings share key company metrics, updates, and customer stories. We also spotlight a team member’s “Life Story” each month - it’s one of the ways we stay connected as a global team.
High velocity, low friction: Our systems are modern and fully integrated, so you’ll spend your time solving problems - not fighting tools.
Performance-driven growth: Seven of our last ten pay increases were made proactively, based on impact and results.
True flexibility: We focus on outcomes, not hours. You’ll have autonomy to manage your time and work where you perform best - with no time monitoring or unnecessary meetings.
Collaboration: You’ll work closely with other teams - engineering, product, design, marketing, and customer success - to move fast and deliver meaningful results.
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
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
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
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.
You need to be technical enough to be credible. 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 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.
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're technical enough to be credible with engineers and to smell a bad estimate.
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 main part of your job. Managers can stay hands-on at the edges, but this is not an IC role.
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
A software engineering background, with enough technical depth to be credible and to challenge estimates
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
Hands-on background in TypeScript, Node.js, Angular or React, MongoDB, or AWS
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
Bonus Tools:
TypeScript / JavaScript
AWS
Observability tooling (HyperDX, Datadog, Bugsnag, Sentry)
AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar)
PLEASE Note:
We do not use recruitment partners or services, so please save your time and don't reach out
