Lead Software Engineer

About Mana
Mana is an AI-native child-development platform that helps educators do more of what they love and less of the grind — improving learning outcomes during the most critical years of brain development. We're backed by OIF Ventures and trusted by thousands of high-quality early education groups.
We believe in great practice + practical technology = magic. We're a challenger brand with big ambitions: thoughtful, curious, good-humoured and relentlessly practical. We speak plainly, then turn up the energy when it matters — we call it practical magic.
The Role
We are considering candidates based in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane
You will be Mana's Lead Software Engineer, the person who shapes how we build. Working directly with our Founder, you'll own the technical direction of an AI-native product used by educators across Australia.
What You'll Do
Technical Leadership & ArchitectureOwn the technical direction of Mana's product — making the calls that compound over time: infrastructure, AI pipeline design, tooling, and the patterns the team builds on.Work directly with the Founder to translate product ambition into engineering reality, fast.Set and raise the engineering bar — through code review, technical decisions, and the culture you model day to day.
AI-Native EngineeringDrive deep adoption of AI engineering practices across the team — agentic workflows, evals, prompt and model versioning, multi-modal pipelines.Push the frontier of what's possible with AI tooling, leveraging it as a genuine force multiplier on what the team can ship.Build and evolve the shared AI infrastructure underpinning multiple product surfaces.
Product Engineering CraftBring strong product instincts to everything you build. You're the person who catches the detail that makes something feel great, and the one who pushes back when a spec doesn't serve the user.Own meaningful product surfaces end-to-end: discovery, design, build, ship, quality.Talk to educators, centre directors, and operators directly. No PM layer between you and the people using your work.Ship fast, instrument what you ship, and iterate with intent.
You're Likely A Fit If You Have
7+ years in software engineering, including time in senior or lead roles at startups or scaleups where you owned technical decisions.Strong fluency with AI-native development. You've shipped production systems using agentic workflows, evals, and modern model tooling, and you think about these as core engineering practice.Full-stack capability across a modern product stack. Ours includes Node, Flutter, Firebase, Cloud Run, GCP, and more. We don't expect you to know all of it, but we expect you to move fast in unfamiliar territory.Strong product engineering instincts, owning product outcomes, and you care about what ships as much as how it ships.Experience building and scaling engineering teams, with an approach to hiring and culture that attracts great people.A genuine desire to do something that matters. Early childhood education is one of the most high-leverage sectors in the world — you should find that exciting.