Link to role overview and process walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/887a3f540dc54711abd6171b837ddf61
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Brief overview of this role:
- Reports to: CEO
- Level: C-Suite (M14 on Sitemate’s career framework)
- Location: Melbourne, Australia. Hybrid, 2 days in office
- Team: Engineering function of ~42 engineers across EPD. Direct line over Global Platform and EPD Ops (~20 people through two engineering function leads) plus the Staff Engineer layer. Tech Leads embedded in product teams roll up on technical standards and career
- Remuneration: AUD 300,000+ (excl. Super)
About Sitemate
Sitemate builds best-in-class software and AI agents for the built world, helping construction, infrastructure and industrial companies work smarter and faster. Our mission is to multiply the engineering power of the built world.
Storm is the #1 data capture agent for the front line of the built world – converting audio, photos and videos into clean structured records.
With conversational support in-app and across SMS, Whatsapp and phone calls, Storm is shifting front line workers from paperwork and clunky digital forms, to natural language and multi-channel data capture.
Our core platforms are Dashpivot (safety, quality and field reporting), Gearbelt (fleet and asset management), Flowsite (no-code integrations), and the Sitemate mobile app for every worker on site.
We have strong product-market fit, generating thousands of new leads per month through word of mouth and organic channels. We are backed by Blackbird, with 200 people across 18+ countries and entities in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.
Why this role exists now
Sitemate’s product stack has evolved for the AI era – broken down into Platform, SaaS and Agent.
The question in front of us is no longer what we can build – it is how fast and how safely our delivery system turns what engineers and agents produce into shipped, trusted outcomes for customers.
This role owns that system, and the people who run it.
The role
Sitemate’s CTO owns technical direction and engineering execution across the business and is a member of the executive team.
This is a hands-on, builder-first executive role – you build systems that enable engineers to bring the company’s technology strategy to life.
You ship alongside your team, and set the technical bar through your own work.
At Sitemate, managers are player-coaches at every level up to and including the C-suite; time on the tools sharpens the bar you hold, it does not replace the leadership work.
What you own
At Sitemate the C-suite sets the company agenda and defines how we operate in their domain. For the CTO seat that means:
- The engineering delivery system. Global Platform, EPD Ops, release engineering, QA infrastructure, security posture and engineering tooling
- The engineering organisation. Org design, engineering career tracks and levels, compensation architecture within the company framework, and the hiring bar
- The engineering operating cadence. Quarterly initiative planning for engineering, the breakdown standard beneath it, and the scoreboard that proves work moved a baseline
Who you work with
- CEO. Your manager and your executive peer
- Chief Product Officer. Your closest partner. Product owns what we build and why; you own how it gets built, how fast, and to what standard. You underpin the EPD roadmap, quarterly planning and the product-team structure
- Staff Engineers and Tech Leads. The layer you build out and lead through. Staff Engineers carry technical direction across products; Tech Leads carry it inside each product team. You develop them, hold them to a bar, and delegate technical review to them as they grow
- Engineering function leads (Global Platform, EPD Ops). Your direct reports for the shared platform and the delivery system
- Operations. Your partners on org design, levelling, compensation and hiring
- GTM and Marketing leadership. You keep engineering close to customers and revenue, and you show up in front of customers when it matters
What needs to happen
In rough order of leverage:
- Turn AI-assisted engineering into throughput to production. Every engineer has AI coding tools. The job is to make the whole pipeline (review, deploy, QA) move at the pace code is now written, measured in changes shipped to customers, and to hold quality steady while it does
- Decouple deploy from release. Feature flags, cohort and staged rollouts, fast rollback and trunk-based development across every product, web and mobile, so releases reach the people they are meant for and can be turned off without a deploy
- Own the verification layer as one system. Strict typing across every repo, schema contracts at the write boundary, QA built into the release process itself, and a security testing cadence above the compliance minimum
- Make records safe for many writers. Our forms are increasingly written to by several people and by agents at once. Field-level saves, conflict detection, live sync and clear attribution of who or what wrote each change
- Shape the forward-deployed engineering model. How engineering ownership works as engineers sit closer to customers, and how the handoffs work with product and GTM
What success looks like
By 90 days
- You have shipped code in every main product repo and have identified the constraints holding back delivery, reliability and/or quality, in various parts of the stack
- You are now owning the relevant initiatives in our delivery system and showing as assigned
By 6 months
- Changes shipped to production per engineer are measurably up, and the production defect line has not moved with them
- Release engineering rails are live
- Quality is measured from production defects traced to the change that caused them, so the quality bar is a number
- You have made at least one hire and one leadership decision that raised the bar
By 12 months
- Strict typing and schema contracts are on across every product, and the compiler and contract layer are doing review work humans used to do
- QA runs inside the release process with a shared eval harness for agent surfaces
- Agent throughput is limited by review capacity you deliberately designed, validation is built into the engine architecture itself
Day-to-day
- Personally review code and ship alongside your team
- Run the weekly constraint review: the one binding constraint in the delivery system this week, what was done about last week’s, and what the data says
- Own quarterly engineering initiative planning and the breakdown standard beneath it
- Coach Staff Engineers and Tech Leads on technical direction, review and running their own teams
- Make build/buy/partner and vendor calls on the platform, tooling and AI stack
- Represent engineering to the CEO, the executive team and the board, and translate company strategy into engineering priorities
- Show up in front of customers and candidates as the technical face of Sitemate
How we build
Our Operating Principles are non-negotiable behavioural standards, written down and used in reviews. The ones this seat lives and enforces:
- You ship your org chart. If we want an initiative to ship, we look at the team structure first. Org design is engineering work.
- Grow from within. Before opening a search, ask whether someone on the team is ready or nearly ready.
- Build the business like we build product. Engineering health is measured and reviewed like a product surface.
- Every feature has a roadmap. Small shippable increments over big-bang releases, for platform and infrastructure work as much as for features.
- Build AI native. All teams are empowered to build with AI. The CTO sets the guardrails that let them do it safely.
- Fix before building. Critical production issues outrank new features, every time.
And the values you will be held to most visibly: Everything Engineered (we write things down: decision logs, frameworks, initiatives with baselines), Fast Tracked (decisions of weight get a forcing function, not a drift), and High Vis (metrics, pay, career frameworks and engineering data are visible to the whole company).
Who this role is for
- Open across a wide seniority range – you don’t need to have held the CTO title before. We’re hiring for capability and capacity to lead the orgYou have led engineering through a high-growth, high-change period before, ideally including a scale-up transition and a shift in how the team builds software.
- You thrive with ambiguity: given only a symptom, you move fast on your best hypothesis and adjust as you learn more
- You have direct, hands-on experience with AI-assisted or agentic code review and delivery tooling, and current opinions about where it fails
- You have a strong point of view on how engineering teams should be structured and how ownership should work as they scale, and you can defend it
- You have hired and developed staff-level engineers and technical leads, and you are measured by the leaders you produce as much as the systems you ship
- You actively choose in-person, embedded leadership and believe standards spread through proximity
- You raise uncomfortable truths early, including upward
- You lead by example
Who this role is not for
- You want a full audit or a lot more data before making any move on an ambiguous problem
- Your instinct is to solve delivery problems through more tooling adoption
- Your career has been built primarily around remote or distributed leadership
- You are comfortable with automated or AI-driven systems being a black box, as long as they work
- Being the strongest engineer in the room matters to you more than building one that doesn’t need you
Skills and tools
Must have
- Proven ability to diagnose and remove delivery bottlenecks across review, deployment, quality – beyond the point code is written
- Genuine, current hands-on technical depth: you can walk through a recent technical decision you personally made in detail
- Direct experience with agentic delivery infrastructure: sandboxes, eval harnesses, deterministic gates, AI-assisted review
- A clear point of view on structuring engineering teams and ownership as they scale
- A 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
Essential tools
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Node.js
- React or Angular
- MongoDB
- AWS or a 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
Read before you apply
These are public, and they are how we actually operate. Candidates who have read them tend to have better conversations with us.
- The Sitemate Manifesto
- On How Sitemate Ships Now, In The Era of AI
- Zero Click Forms and Conversational Data Capture, the thinking behind Storm
- Taking AI To The Front Line
- On Sitemate’s Values, Culture and DNA
- For The Managers and Leaders Building Sitemate
- On How Sitemate Makes Decisions
- On Operating Like a Pro Sports Team, Not a Family
Life at Sitemate
- Full transparency: monthly all-hands share metrics, hiring plans and financial performance. Levels, career frameworks and pay ranges are visible to every employee
- Player-coach leadership at every level, including the executive team
- Global team across Australia, the UK, the US and Canada
- Melbourne engineering hub
- Equity, 20 days annual leave plus sick, carer’s and compassionate leave, 16 weeks primary and 6 weeks secondary carer parental leave, EAP, L&D budget, home office setup, weekly catered lunches, work-from-anywhere weeks, flex days
- People of Sitemate link to hear from the team directly
PLEASE Note:
- We hire directly and don’t work with agencies
