Engineering Director

About Reapit

Reapit is a pioneering end-to-end technology provider serving estate agencies globally, including Europe, Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand for over 25 years. Their platform connects property professionals with buyers, sellers, tenants, and landlords, supporting relationship-driven real estate businesses. In Australia, Reapit is the preferred technology provider for leading estate agents, offering tailored tools in sales, property management, client engagement, and data analytics to support leadership in the real estate market.

Role Overview

The Engineering Director will spearhead and nurture engineering teams within our regional business vertical, overseeing multiple delivery squads. This role is centered on people-first leadership, requiring an experienced technology manager who fosters genuine relationships, mentors engineers, and actively cultivates talent growth. The organisational structure is intentionally flat to maintain close connections between leaders and teams, emphasizing leadership through credibility and relationships rather than hierarchical management. Hands-on involvement with teams is expected, though direct coding may not be frequent.

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a broad spectrum of engineers, from entry-level to principal, ensuring close engagement through a flat reporting structure.
• Mentor and coach team members by building trust, understanding individual strengths and goals, and promoting a culture of mentorship across the organisation.
• Conduct regular, impactful one-on-one meetings, proactively managing performance using skills matrices and addressing issues constructively through both informal and formal processes.
• Advance continuous deployment initiatives in collaboration with DevOps and QA leaders, improving CI/CD pipelines, automation, and deployment efficiencies, with a focus on tools like GitHub Actions.
• Champion the Global Technology Strategy including centralized Platform as a Service, shared utilities such as Reapit Connect, Elements, Design System, CLI tools, and Infrastructure as a Service, promoting broad understanding across engineering teams.
• Drive software modernization and technical debt management by encouraging the replacement of legacy systems with scalable, cloud-native architectures and establishing prioritized maintenance practices.
• Collaborate with Product leaders to align engineering roadmaps with strategic business goals, balancing product innovation, technical modernization, customer needs, and team capacity.
• Oversee squad organization and resource planning, adjusting team compositions to meet immediate and long-term objectives while anticipating future skill needs and contributing to workforce and budget plans.
• Report on engineering performance metrics including efficiency, code quality, technical debt reduction, and test coverage to senior leadership and participate in quarterly technology reviews using indicators like DORA metrics.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaborations with stakeholders such as CISO, CIO, CPO, VPE, Regional GM, tech leads, account managers, marketing, sales, and HR.
• Represent software development on the Regional Leadership Team and contribute to the Regional Product Council.
• Manage organizational change and risks by communicating decision rationales transparently and handling concerns openly.
• Integrate security best practices in development by working with security teams to enforce static analysis, code scanning with tools such as Snyk and AppCheck, and ensuring timely remediation of vulnerabilities aligning with security SLAs.
• Lead engineering incident responses as the primary accountable party, coordinating operational actions and mitigating business impact.

Candidate Profile and Qualifications

• Proven leadership experience of software engineering teams with a history of mentoring and building trusted, high-performance teams.
• A robust engineering foundation through hands-on software delivery experience, providing credibility to lead technical teams and influence design decisions.
• Preferred experience managing teams transitioning to continuous delivery and scaling engineering organizations with multiple squads, including workforce planning.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or demonstrable equivalent experience is preferred.
• Exceptional relationship-building skills and an authentic people-focus to foster team growth, wellbeing, and career development.
• Ability to handle sensitive conversations regarding performance and compensation with integrity and care.
• Leadership style that promotes team autonomy balanced with accountability to outcomes.
• Strong understanding of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, trunk-based development, automated testing, and observability.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, microservices, API design (ideally on AWS), and principles of secure, well-architected code.
• Knowledge of embedding security and quality into the development lifecycle through static analysis and code scanning tools.
• Experience standardizing on toolchains like Jira and GitHub Enterprise is an asset.

Expected Impact Timeline

• First Month: Establish trust with your reports, understand their individual strengths and goals, review the squads’ current processes and continuous deployment progress, and get acquainted with company products and technology strategy.
• First Three Months: Conduct effective one-on-one meetings with active mentorship, manage performance issues, gain team trust as a supportive leader, and contribute to roadmap alignment and resource planning with leadership.
• First Six Months: Lead a motivated, high-trust engineering vertical with a strong mentorship culture, develop medium-term workforce plans, and represent R&D in regional leadership and escalation activities.

Additional Information

This position is based in Brisbane and operates under a flexible working policy encouraging a balance between office and home, but requires onsite presence in Brisbane office at least 2-3 days weekly due to the leadership nature of the role.

Reapit is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace and encourages applications from candidates who share its values and positivity. The company values equal employment opportunity and supports an empowering environment that respects and supports all employees.