Lead Software Engineer

• Be the team’s hands-on technical owner, designing, building and reviewing across the full stack while leading by example.  
• Own architecture and system design, making pragmatic trade-offs and keeping complexity under control across distributed and event-driven systems.  
• Set and hold the engineering quality bar across CI/CD, testing, observability, security and operational readiness.  
• Shift quality left by shaping acceptance criteria, edge-case coverage and verification practices so issues are caught before release.  
• Confirm features are genuinely live, working as intended and moving the customer or business metrics they were designed to improve.  
• Lead incident response when needed and drive the operational improvements that prevent repeat issues.  
• Become a reference point for how marketplace growth products and systems work, including complex, legacy and less understood areas.  
• Turn critical system knowledge into clear documentation so the team can reduce key-person risk and make better decisions faster.  
• Partner with Product Managers, Designers, Data Analysts and Engineers to test assumptions, spot risky dependencies and shape better solutions earlier.  
• Bring rigour to experimentation, including sound A/B test design, correct cohorts and metrics the team can trust.  
• Use AI to accelerate the delivery lifecycle and champion spec-driven development as a practical default for the team.  
• Lift the team’s capability in using AI and agentic engineering, including where it helps, where it falls short, and how to apply it responsibly.

 

• You’re a hands-on full-stack engineer with strong technical judgement and a track record of shipping reliable production systems.  
• You have adopted an agentic engineering mindset and can help others use AI and agents to improve delivery quality and throughput.  
• You understand how to improve the agentic loop so AI-assisted development produces high-quality, well-verified outcomes.  
• You connect technical decisions to business and customer outcomes, and can clearly explain the “why” behind the work.  
• You have strong experience with distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, services at scale and how these systems fail.  
• You have practical experience running A/B experiments and designing systems that support experimentation as a first-class capability.  
• You have lifted engineering quality and reliability through verification, operational discipline, shift-left practices and thoughtful technical debt reduction.  
• You can set and hold a high technical bar while mentoring engineers towards it.  
• You bring a practical understanding of how AI works and how to apply it across specification, development, testing and deployment.  
• You’re comfortable working closely with product, design and data partners to challenge scope, sequencing and approach in service of better customer outcomes.

Nice to have:

• Background in marketplaces, pricing, monetisation, recommendation or matching systems.  
• Experience partnering with data science or ML engineers on production models such as pricing, ranking or recommendations.  
• Experience working with distributed or offshore teams across multiple locations and time zones.  
• Cloud-native experience with AWS or GCP, modern CI/CD and deployment practices such as Kubernetes, ArgoCD or GitHub Actions.

 

Life at hipages:

We’re more than just a workplace. We’re a place where you can be yourself, do great work and grow your career. Recognised as a Great Place to Work, our inclusive, supportive culture helps people thrive.

You’ll use the best tools and tech, with real impact on our products and customers. We invest in your development and lead with coaching, not micromanagement - it’s why 85% of our team say their leader is great.

And there’s more:

• Diverse, collaborative teams that love solving problems  
• Agile squads, hackathons, off-sites and roadshows  
• Extra leave for birthdays, volunteering, and more
• Healthy snacks, continental breakfast and fresh fruit 
• Sydney CBD office near Town Hall and Gadigal Stations 
• Tailored growth support, mentoring and stretch projects 
• A vibrant social scene - we work hard and have fun doing it  

We prioritise Diversity:

At hipages, innovation and collaboration thrive in diverse and inclusive teams. We don’t expect you to know everything - we care more about who you are as a person, a team member, and a leader.

We’re proud to be endorsed by WORK180 for supporting women’s careers and we value diversity across culture, age, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Research shows that men often apply when they meet just 60% of the criteria, while women and minority groups wait until they tick every box. If you think you’d be a great fit - even if you don’t meet every requirement - we’d love to hear from you.

We’re also a Circle Back Initiative Employer, which means we commit to responding to every applicant.

 

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