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Salary: AUD 300,000 - 0 / annual
Sitemate is a software and AI company serving the construction, infrastructure, and industrial sectors. The company builds best-in-class platforms including Storm (AI data capture agent), Dashpivot (safety/quality/field reporting), Gearbelt (fleet/asset management), Flowsite (no-code integrations), and the Sitemate mobile app. Backed by Blackbird, the company has 200 people across 18+ countries with offices in Australia, UK, US, and Canada.
The CTO is a C-Suite executive reporting to the CEO and a member of the executive team. This is a hands-on, builder-first role where you ship code alongside your engineering team while setting technical standards through personal example. You own three core domains:
1. Engineering Delivery System: Global Platform, EPD Ops, release engineering, QA infrastructure, security posture, and engineering tooling
2. Engineering Organization: Org design, career tracks and levels, compensation architecture, and hiring bar
3. Engineering Operating Cadence: Quarterly initiative planning, breakdown standards, and performance metrics
Key priorities include: turning AI-assisted engineering into production throughput; decoupling deploy from release through feature flags and trunk-based development; owning verification as one system with strict typing and schema contracts; enabling safe multi-writer records with field-level saves and conflict detection; and shaping forward-deployed engineering models as engineers sit closer to customers.
Day-to-day responsibilities include personally reviewing code and shipping with the team, running weekly constraint reviews, owning quarterly engineering planning, coaching Staff Engineers and Tech Leads, making build/buy/partner decisions on platform and tooling, representing engineering to the CEO and board, and serving as the technical face of Sitemate to customers and candidates.
You will manage approximately 42 engineers across Engineering Product Development (EPD), with direct oversight of Global Platform and EPD Ops (~20 people through two engineering function leads) plus the Staff Engineer layer. Tech Leads embedded in product teams report on technical standards and career development.
Success metrics: By 90 days, ship code in every main product repo and identify delivery/reliability/quality constraints. By 6 months, measurably increase changes shipped per engineer while maintaining production defect rates, deploy release engineering rails, measure quality from production defects, and make at least one hire and one leadership decision that raises the bar. By 12 months, implement strict typing and schema contracts across all products, integrate QA into the release process with shared eval harness for agent surfaces, and design agent throughput limited by deliberate review capacity.
The role operates under Sitemate's Operating Principles: ship your org chart, grow from within, build the business like product, every feature has a roadmap, build AI native, and fix before building. You will be held to values of Everything Engineered (written decisions and frameworks), Fast Tracked (forcing functions for weighted decisions), and High Vis (transparent metrics, pay, and career frameworks).
Location: Melbourne, Australia office. Hybrid, 2 days in office per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must Have:
- Proven ability to diagnose and remove delivery bottlenecks across review, deployment, and quality beyond code writing
- Genuine, current hands-on technical depth with ability to walk through recent technical decisions in detail
- Direct experience with agentic delivery infrastructure: sandboxes, eval harnesses, deterministic gates, AI-assisted review
- Clear point of view on structuring engineering teams and ownership as they scale
- Track record of compressing timelines and resisting process or tooling for its own sake
- Experience building and developing a staff engineering or technical leadership layer
- Comfort operating as a bridge between engineering and executive leadership, including board exposure
- Led engineering through high-growth, high-change periods, ideally including scale-up transition and shifts in how teams build software
- Thrive with ambiguity; move fast on best hypothesis and adjust as you learn
- Direct, hands-on experience with AI-assisted or agentic code review and delivery tooling with current opinions on limitations
- Strong point of view on engineering team structure and ownership scaling
- Hired and developed staff-level engineers and technical leads
- Actively choose in-person, embedded leadership; believe standards spread through proximity
- Raise uncomfortable truths early, including upward
- Lead by example
Essential Tools:
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Node.js
- React or Angular
- MongoDB
- AWS or comparable cloud platform
Bonus Tools:
- React Native / mobile
- Observability tooling (HyperDX, Datadog, Bugsnag, Sentry)
- Infrastructure as code (CDK, Terraform)
- Feature flag and release engineering platforms
Not a fit if: You want extensive audit or data before moving on ambiguous problems; instinct is to solve delivery problems through more tooling adoption; career built primarily on remote/distributed leadership; comfortable with automated/AI systems as black boxes; believe being the strongest engineer in the room matters more than building one that doesn't need you.
