Australian award-winning SaaS business, 15 years old and now 250 staff, operating in a complex and highly regulated domain, are looking for a Head of Engineering to build the engineering foundations and leadership structure needed to support their next phase of platform-led growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Own how the platform is built, run and evolved, ensuring engineering operates as a reliable, secure and scalable system rather than a reactive delivery function
• Define and embed consistent engineering standards, structure, governance and ways of working across multiple teams and disciplines
• Set and maintain technical direction, ensuring priorities and trade-offs are applied consistently as business needs evolve
• Stay close to architecture, platform strategy and technical direction, remaining technically credible enough to guide decisions and challenge assumptions without sitting in code day to day
• Protect platform scalability and ensure technical debt remains visible, understood and actively managed
• Improve release cadence, delivery predictability, quality and prioritisation discipline so engineering consistently delivers what it commits to
• Build a healthier operating rhythm with Product and Delivery, establishing clear ownership, mutual respect and shared prioritisation discipline across the three functions
• Reduce bespoke, customer-driven work flowing into engineering by default, helping the business make better trade-offs between short-term demand and long-term platform integrity
• Lead through the engineering leadership layer, coaching and mentoring an Engineering Manager, Team Leads and senior technical specialists
• Improve accountability and consistency across the function and create clearer career progression and capability development
• Define how engineering should operate as the business scales, including organisation design and operating model evolution
• Contribute as a member of the Senior Leadership Team to enterprise-level decisions, ensuring engineering considerations are clearly understood in shaping company direction

Desired Skills and Attributes

• Proven experience leading engineering in a B2B SaaS, scale-up or equivalent platform environment, with accountability for delivery, platform performance, reliability and technical sustainability
• A demonstrable track record of shifting a business from services-led, customer-request-driven delivery toward a scalable, product-led platform model
• Strength in establishing and evolving engineering as a coherent function through structure, standards and consistent ways of working
• Experience leading through managers and senior leaders, building leadership capability, alignment and accountability beneath you
• A history of scaling engineering teams and uplifting maturity, capability and delivery discipline without slowing the business down
• Strong judgement in organisation design, capability development and operating model evolution
• The ability to balance speed, quality and long-term sustainability, and to hold the line when commercial pressure pulls engineering toward short-term feature work
• Confident partnership with Product and Delivery, with the credibility to influence at executive level
• Architectural and platform oversight, with familiarity across modern cloud-based SaaS environments and practices such as CI/CD
• A leader rather than a hands-on hero engineer, focused on building scalable teams and clear systems rather than being the person every problem routes back to
• Clear, direct communication, with practical examples of what was broken, what changed and what improved as a result

Why Join?

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

You will work directly with the CEO and Senior Leadership Team, helping shift the company from services-led delivery to product-platform scale. You will shape the engineering operating model from the foundations up, coach and develop a capable leadership layer, and create the structure, standards and clarity that allow the platform to evolve over the long term.

The team is established, with an Engineering Manager, Team Leads, a strong group of developers, QA capability, a Staff Platform Engineer, a Principal Engineer and cloud engineering support, so you will be leading capable people rather than building from nothing. The role gives you real ownership to introduce structure without unnecessary bureaucracy and to leave a lasting mark on how the business builds.

AI is likely to become part of the future platform strategy, but the immediate priority is foundations, scalability, technical leadership and operating model maturity, giving the right person room to shape what comes next.

Apply now and one of the White Bay team will reach out to you very soon.

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• Define engineering at genuine scale
• Shape strategy with the CEO
• Build platform, not bespoke delivery



B2B SaaS, Engineering Leadership, Platform Engineering, Operating Model, Technical Strategy, Architecture, CI/CD, Product-led, Team Leadership, Scalability, Cloud, Delivery, SLT