Engineering Director

About Reapit

Reapit is a longstanding provider of end-to-end business technology solutions tailored for estate agencies of all sizes. With over 25 years of experience, we support real estate professionals across Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand, connecting them with clients to drive successful property transactions. In Australia, Reapit is recognized as the premier technology partner for leading estate agencies, offering comprehensive tools for sales, property management, client engagement, and data analytics.

Role Overview

The Engineering Director will lead and mentor multiple engineering teams within the region, overseeing various delivery squads in a people-centric leadership capacity. This role involves managing a broad span of direct reports in a flat organizational structure that keeps leadership closely connected with teams and technical work. Although the role is not primarily coding-focused, technical credibility and hands-on involvement with teams are essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide direct line management for a diverse group of engineers from junior to principal levels, fostering a supportive and growth-oriented environment.
• Build trusting relationships through continual mentorship, career coaching, and development opportunities, encouraging others to engage in mentorship.
• Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to address performance, strategy alignment, and individual concerns proactively, managing performance with clear metrics.
• Ensure timely completion of formal people processes such as reviews, compensation discussions, and other HR-related ceremonies.
• Advocate and guide the transition to a continuous deployment model, collaborating with DevOps and QA teams to enhance CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Promote a culture emphasizing technical excellence, collaboration, innovation, and maintain close involvement in guiding architectural and design decisions.
• Support the organization's global technology strategy, including central platforms, shared tooling, design systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Champion modernization efforts by phasing out legacy systems in favor of scalable cloud-native architectures and managing technical debt effectively alongside delivery priorities.
• Collaborate with product leadership to synchronize engineering roadmaps with business goals, balancing development, modernization, customer needs, and resource availability.
• Oversee squad structuring and resource allocation to meet both short-term objectives and longer-term workforce planning spanning 6 to 24 months.
• Report on engineering performance metrics such as code quality, debt reduction, test coverage, and DORA metrics to senior leadership and during quarterly reviews.
• Engage with cross-functional stakeholders including security, product, sales, and HR teams to ensure alignment and transparency.
• Represent engineering on the Regional Leadership Team, actively participating in strategy and product councils.
• Lead change management initiatives, communicating decisions and managing uncertainty openly across the organization.
• Work closely with security leadership to embed security best practices within development cycles, leveraging automated scanning tools and maintaining vulnerability remediation processes.
• Take charge of incident response coordination, managing operational impacts and business continuity.

Who We're Seeking

We value candidates who align with our company culture and values, even if not all qualifications are met. Desired attributes and experiences include:

• Extensive experience managing software engineering teams and nurturing engineer development.
• Strong technical background with hands-on delivery experience to credibly lead technical discussions and decisions.
• Proven ability to manage wide spans of control across different seniorities.
• Preferred experience guiding teams through process changes, particularly moving towards continuous delivery and reducing agile ceremony.
• Experience in scaling environments with multi-squad resource planning.
• A degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent experience is advantageous.
• A leadership style rooted in genuine people engagement, mentorship, and fostering a culture of trust and autonomy.
• Skilled at delivering constructive performance feedback and handling difficult conversations with care.
• Understanding of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, testing strategies, observability, and cloud architectures on platforms like AWS.
• Ability to utilize engineering metrics (such as DORA) to support continuous improvement.
• Incorporates security into the software lifecycle proactively, not as an afterthought.
• Experience working with unified toolchains like Jira and GitHub Enterprise is beneficial.

Impact and Success Milestones

• Within 3 months: Active mentorship, understanding of engineers' goals, management of performance issues, and involvement in roadmap and resource planning.
• Within 6 months: Establishment of a high-trust, motivated engineering unit with a strong culture of technical excellence and mentorship, contribution to workforce planning, and full participation as a trusted Regional Leadership Team member.

Location and Work Arrangement

This position is based in our Brisbane office. While we support flexible working arrangements, this role requires presence in the office 2-3 days each week to maintain close leadership engagement.