Engineering Manager - Digital Platform - Java, Springboot, GCP, GKE - Circa $220-240k + super + bonus
A leading Australian financial institution is building engineering teams that rival the best tech companies in the world. Not managing legacy systems—building a digital bank with modern practices, cloud-native platforms, and an engineering culture where people actually want to work.
We're looking for Engineering Managers who've built and scaled high-performing teams at product-led tech companies. Leaders who know what exceptional engineering culture looks like and can create environments where engineers do their best work.
This is a chance to bring Big Tech leadership practices to an organisation with the scale, resources, and executive backing to execute properly.
What You'll Own
People Leadership (20-40 Engineers across 2-4 Scrum Teams):
- Hire, mentor, and coach engineers and aspiring engineering leaders
- Build psychologically safe environments where high performance thrives
- Develop your team members' careers—help them become masters of their craft
- Hold people accountable while providing genuine support
- Balance authority with empathy—guide challenging team members while keeping team objectives front and center
Technical Ownership:
- Own design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of team-owned products and platforms
- Deep dive into technical problems when needed—you're hands-on, not hands-off
- Ensure high code quality, testing, and security standards are non-negotiable
- Work with engineering leaders across teams to unblock delivery issues
- You're accountable for reliability and uptime of applications your teams own
Execution Excellence:
- Work closely with product managers to ensure teams understand the problems they're solving
- Participate in incident management and on-call rotations—show ownership when there are problems
- Run post-mortems and ensure actions get completed
- Continuously improve systems over time, not just keep them running
This role is roughly: 60% people leadership, 20% technical architecture, 20% delivery management.
The Leader We're Looking For...
Your Background:
- Proven experience managing multiple software engineering teams at a product-focused tech company
- Strong technical foundation (Java-based experience preferred, but we care more about your engineering depth)
- Track record delivering complex engineering initiatives in Agile environments
- You understand how to build scalable, maintainable, and performant web applications
- Computer science education or equivalent hands-on experience
What Sets You Apart:
- Commitment to Excellence: Mediocrity is unacceptable. You set high standards and hold yourself and your teams accountable for meeting them. Small details matter.
- Never Say Die Attitude: Resilience through tough projects, delivery setbacks, and team challenges. You push forward and maintain positivity in the face of adversity.
- Team-First Mentality: You prioritise the team's success over personal achievement. Your job is to make your engineers successful, not to be the hero.
- Relationship Builder: You develop strong connections with team members, understand what motivates them, and connect on a personal level. You know your team's strengths and use that knowledge effectively.
- Adaptable Problem-Solver: You adjust strategies when facing challenges, guide teams through uncertainty, and use your expertise to navigate ambiguity.
- Prepared and Ready: Thorough planning, anticipating pitfalls, ensuring your team has resources and knowledge to execute efficiently.
- Emotional Intelligence: You stay calm under pressure, control emotions during stress, and inspire confidence in your team through composure.
- Growth-Focused: Continuous improvement for yourself and your team. You're a mentor who creates environments where learning and development are prioritised.
- Direct but Supportive: You address underperformance directly, ensure people understand impact, but also provide the support they need to improve.
In your first 6 months, you will have:
- Built trust with your teams and established psychological safety
- Identified and addressed gaps in team capabilities, processes, or tooling
- Improved delivery velocity and code quality measurably
- Hired at least 2-3 strong engineers who raise the bar
- Established strong working relationships with product and engineering peers
- Reduced incidents or improved incident response times
- Created a culture where engineers feel empowered to "do it right"
Long-term, you're successful when:
- Your teams consistently deliver high-quality software on time
- Engineers are growing in their careers and want to stay on your teams
- Other engineering leaders seek you out for advice and collaboration
- Your applications have strong uptime and reliability
- You're developing the next generation of engineering leaders
The Environment You'll Build In
- Modern Tech Stack: Cloud-native (Google Cloud), microservices, proper CI/CD, latest technologies to solve banking and finance problems at scale.
- Autonomous Teams: Engineers are empowered to make decisions, own outcomes, and continuously learn. Your job is to enable them, not micromanage them.
- Real Scale: Millions of customers, market-leading products, genuine technical challenges that require thoughtful engineering.
Interested? Apply now
