Head of Engineering

EdTech | Direct to Consumer Online Learning Platform

Run engineering and delivery on a busy consumer learning platform. Report to the CEO, Sydney CBD hybrid, and a clear path to CTO.

- You are a working engineering leader who still enjoys the detail. You run the backlog, review the architecture and lead from the front when something breaks.
- You report straight to the CEO and work as their technical partner. Decisions get made quickly, your calls on tech carry real weight, and there is a clear path to CTO within three to four years.
- A Sydney CBD office with 2 to 3 days in and the rest from home.

About the company

You would be joining a leading Australian EdTech business that runs a direct to consumer online learning platform for school students across Australia and New Zealand. Every live session captures data on how each student learns, and that data powers an AI-supported learning product that makes each student's experience more personal. It is a proper consumer application with real platform complexity: high volumes of live sessions and subscriptions, and frequent releases.

The business is releasing more than ever.

About the role

Reporting to the CEO, you will take ownership of engineering and delivery for the whole platform, from the quarterly plan through to each release. Around 80 to 85% of your time goes on engineering and delivery, and the rest on technical strategy, security and governance. You will lead the engineering team across Sydney and the Philippines, act as the CEO's technical partner, and be the face of tech to the wider business. There is a clear path to CTO within three to four years.





Key Responsibilities

You will

- Own the engineering roadmap and quarterly delivery plan, around 10 major initiatives a quarter, and run sprints, backlog, requirements and releases hands on
- Keep a high release cadence without breaking things, owning uptime, incidents and recovery
- Coordinate front end, back end, Salesforce, QA and data so major initiatives ship on time
- Move engineers from stack specialists to owners of initiatives end to end, including running playbacks with business stakeholders
- Lead the shift to AI in how the team writes, tests and ships code, building on tools already in use like Cursor and Claude
- Bring existing codebases together into one platform, and deliver the front end and AI pipeline work planned for the next three to six months
- Own architecture and build, buy or retire decisions, including moving off MuleSoft and reducing reliance on Salesforce over 12 to 24 months
- Assess the team and lead a staged plan over around six months towards a unified full stack, cloud native team, while protecting critical knowledge
- Manage technical vendors, and forecast and control AWS and SaaS spend

What They Are Looking For

Personality matters as much as the CV here.



You are energised by pace and volume, and you stay steady when things move quickly. You think fast, you are comfortable with good over perfect, and you fix things quickly when they go wrong. You stay close to the detail rather than delegating delivery away. You are honest and direct with a CEO who is the same, and you want to grow into a CTO role.

On the experience side, you will have:

- Engineering leadership in a D2C online platform, consumer app or SaaS business with real platform complexity, rather than website or marketing builds
- Time in high pace, high transaction volume environments with fast development cycles. B2B backgrounds work if they share these traits
- Run engineering and delivery hands on as a Head of Engineering or similar, with examples of projects you got moving again
- Been through a platform rebuild, stack simplification or scale up phase
- Hands on AWS full stack and React experience, with a robust view on keeping a stack simple
- Practical experience putting AI to work in how a team builds, or in the product itself, highly valued
- Experience moving off Salesforce, MuleSoft or a similar platform, highly valued
- A subscription or EdTech background, which is a bonus

This is not the right fit for someone from a mainly infrastructure or IT background, or someone looking for a pure strategy role with no day to day delivery.

If you want to work side by side with a hands on CEO, put AI to real use in how a product gets built, and grow into a CTO role, this one will give you that. Get in touch for a confidential chat.

📌 Head of Engineering (Sydney)
🏢 Think u0026 Grow
📍 Sydney