A VC-backed Sydney scale-up building consumer and B2B2C software in a regulated industry. The business is growing strongly and leads its category.

Engineers here are involved early. They understand the “why”, decide the “how”, and own what they build through to production. There’s regular engineer-led time for tech debt and developer experience, quarterly AI hackathons, and a feedback culture that’s open, direct and ego-free.

The role

You’ll lead a cross-functional squad of around 5 engineers across several concurrent initiatives, working with Product and Design as equal partners. You’ll own the full software lifecycle from planning to production support, and you’ll make the architecture calls for your squad’s systems.

This is a genuine 50/50 role. You’ll performance-manage and develop your engineers, and you’ll also write and review code alongside them every week. It isn’t a step up for a senior engineer who hasn’t managed people. It also isn’t suited to a manager who has stepped off the tools.

People leadership: what you must have done

The business won’t upskill someone into this. You’ll need recent, hands-on experience of all of the following as the direct manager of engineers:

- Run regular 1:1s with your own direct reports, and set and reviewed their goals and performance.

- Grown engineers into promotions. You should be able to talk through a specific engineer you developed, what you did, and the outcome.

- Managed underperformance yourself. That means leading the difficult conversations, putting a plan in place, and seeing it through, whether the person got back on track or exited.

- Hired engineers. You’ve interviewed candidates and made hiring decisions for your own team.

- Lifted a team’s standards and ways of working, not just your own output.





If you can’t give concrete examples of each, this role won’t be the right fit.

Technical: what you must have

- Strong, recent production experience with TypeScript, Node.js and NestJS.

- A track record of designing and shipping scalable systems, and talking through the trade-offs you made.

- End-to-end ownership of software in production, including reliability, monitoring, testing and on-call.

- Strong judgement on security, permissions and data handling. The product holds sensitive customer information.

- Up-to-date cloud infrastructure and CI/CD. GCP is a plus.

- Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows, and views on how teams should work in the time of AI.

The stack is TypeScript, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Nuxt/Vue and GCP. Vue is a nice-to-have; Node and NestJS are not.

How the interview process works (please read before applying)

- Leadership interview with Product. Expect specific stories about developing people, managing performance and leading through change.

- Engineering leadership conversation about your background, decisions and impact.

- Architecture review. A live, hands-on review of a Node/NestJS codebase with the engineering team. You’ll triage and prioritise issues under time pressure and decide whether the code is ready for production.

- System design challenge.

The technical stages are built heavily around Node and NestJS. If your recent backend experience is mainly Java, .NET, Python, Go or PHP, you’ll find these stages very difficult, even as a strong engineer. Please only apply if Node/NestJS is your day-to-day.

The package

Competitive base salary + super + equity

To apply

Make sure your CV clearly shows both sides of your experience:

- The people side: number of direct reports, 1:1s, performance management, and promotions.

- The technical side: what you’ve personally built and shipped in Node/NestJS.

📌 Engineering Manager (Hands-on) – TypeScript / Node / NestJS (Sydney)
🏢 Pair People Pty
📍 Sydney