Engineering Manager

About Deputy

Deputy is a global SaaS workforce management company with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco, and London, as well as remote employees across the United States. Our platform supports over 1.5 million workers and 375,000 workplaces in more than 100 countries. In 2024, Deputy reached Unicorn status backed by leading global investors.

We focus on improving workforce management for hourly workers — individuals essential to many industries but often overlooked in workplace technology. Our platform helps businesses thrive by boosting profitability, compliance, productivity, and employee engagement.

As an AI-native company, we expect team members to integrate AI tools thoughtfully and creatively in daily work, supported by proper training and encouragement to innovate responsibly.

Role Overview

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, this role leads the engineering team behind Scheduling, a core component of Deputy’s product used globally. The position involves managing and mentoring engineers with varying experience levels, guiding technical decisions, and delivering impactful customer enhancements.

Scheduling is a complex system balancing business demands, employee availability, labor costs, and compliance. This role offers the chance to refine a mature and vital product by modernizing workflows, improving performance for demanding customers, and exploring AI-driven scheduling innovations.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide leadership by setting clear expectations, delivering constructive feedback, and fostering career growth among engineers.
• Promote an inclusive team culture that encourages idea challenges, learning from errors, and maintaining high-quality standards.
• Navigate shifting priorities, manage risks proactively, and sustain a consistent delivery rhythm.
• Recruit carefully to expand the team and facilitate cross-skilling to reduce dependency on individuals.
• Acquire deep understanding of the Scheduling product and architecture to engage in informed technical decision-making.
• Collaborate with senior engineers to define architectural direction and evaluate build versus buy decisions.
• Enhance product performance, security, reliability, and maintainability for a high-impact multi-tenant SaaS system used worldwide.
• Remain actively involved in engineering work through design reviews, architecture discussions, incident analysis, and prototypes.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and Data teams to translate strategy and customer needs into tangible roadmaps and results.
• Balance immediate customer benefits with necessary technical investments to maintain speed, stability, and scalability.
• Maintain team alignment with company goals by explaining priority rationale and trade-offs clearly.
• Lead adoption and refinement of AI-assisted development tools, creating best practices for code review, testing, documentation, and observability.
• Ensure delivered software meets standards for correctness, security, maintainability, and team comprehension.
• Collaborate on customer-facing AI features considering evaluation, safety guardrails, operational costs, latency, and fallback mechanisms.

Candidate Profile

Essential Qualifications:

• Experience leading engineering teams or holding senior technical leadership roles involving direction setting, delivery accountability, and mentoring.
• Strong technical acumen with the ability to engage in in-depth design discussions and clearly communicate decisions to diverse stakeholders.
• Proven track record in delivering and operating customer-facing software with balanced consideration of speed, reliability, and maintainability.
• Experience in coaching engineers effectively through clear expectations and constructive feedback.
• Collaborative experience working with Product and Design teams to prioritize and produce desired outcomes.
• Direct experience using AI development tools, able to critically assess their output and integrate them judiciously.
• Ability to drive progress amid ambiguity by identifying obstacles, uniting relevant parties, and making pragmatic choices.

Desirable Skills:

• Experience building or managing distributed, cloud-native, or multi-tenant SaaS platforms at scale.
• Design knowledge of resilient services, event-driven architectures, and large-scale relational or NoSQL databases.
• Exposure to deploying large language model (LLM) based or agentic features in production.
• Background in workforce management, scheduling, or similarly operational products.

Technology Environment

The team employs a range of technologies including PHP, Go, and Python on AWS infrastructure. While familiarity with these is valuable, the emphasis is on technical depth, sound judgment, and adaptability.

Employee Benefits

• Flexible working arrangements including remote work and a work-from-home budget.
• Participation in an Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP).
• Paid parental leave to support family needs.
• Group Salary Continuance Insurance for financial protection.
• Employee Assistance Program for wellbeing support.
• Additional leave options such as study days, celebration days, and volunteer time.
• Access to global employee groups focused on community, inclusion, and connection.
• Opportunities to participate in annual hackathons fostering innovation.
• Perks like novated leasing for electric vehicles and internet cost reimbursement.

Inclusivity Statement

Deputy is committed to equal opportunity and values diversity as a catalyst for innovation. Our workforce represents various cultures, and we welcome different perspectives and skills.