Head of Engineering / Distinguished Engineer AI Infrastructure | Distributed Systems | Platform Engineering | Sydney.

We’re partnering with one of Australia’s most successful global technology businesses to find an exceptional Head of Engineering / Distinguished Engineer to help define what a 100+ person engineering organisation looks like in an AI-first world. This isn’t a traditional Head of Engineering role focused on process, people management and delivery. We’re looking for someone with serious technical credibility; an engineer at heart who can think three steps ahead, challenge conventional thinking and help make some big bets about how software will be built over the next five years.

The engineering agenda is ambitious. You’ll help build the internal AI infrastructure and developer platforms that enable hundreds of engineers to build better software faster; redesign how work is specced, built, tested and reviewed using AI; open a major product platform to APIs, MCP and autonomous agents; evolve large-scale distributed infrastructure across regions and clouds; and influence major investments across search, data, web, mobile and recent greenfield products. You won’t personally architect everything, but when the hardest technical problems in the company are being debated, you should be one of the people everyone wants in the room.

We’re looking for someone who combines Distinguished Engineer-level technical depth with genuine organisational leadership.



You may already be a VP/Head/Director of Engineering who has refused to become disconnected from technology, or a Distinguished/Principal Engineer who has increasingly found themselves leading teams, managers and engineering strategy. Either way, you’ll have worked in high-performance product environments, be comfortable challenging ambitious founders and executives, and understand that great engineering is ultimately about creating better products and commercial outcomes.

We’d particularly love to hear from people who have:

- Exceptional Computer Science fundamentals, particularly distributed systems, infrastructure and scalable architecture.
- Built AI/ML infrastructure, developer platforms, internal tooling or engineering productivity platforms at meaningful scale.
- Deep thinking around LLMs, agents, MCP, model orchestration, evals, context engineering and the AI-native SDLC.
- Led Senior Engineering Managers, Directors or other senior technical leaders — ideally influencing organisations of 100+ engineers.
- Built complex cloud platforms across AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, multi-region or multi-cloud environments.
- Operated inside an ambitious startup, scale-up or world-class product engineering organisation where speed and technical excellence both matter.
- The judgement to know what to build, what to buy, what to kill and what everyone else will need in three years' time.

For a more detailed overview of this role, company and opportunity please apply below of reach out to [email protected]

📌 Director of Engineering (Sydney)
🏢 The Onset
📍 Sydney