Head of Engineering

Propeller provides hardware and software solutions that make life easier for the people doing the dirty, dangerous, invaluable work that drives our society—construction, mining, aggregates, and waste management.

Like us, the people that make up the industries we serve are passionate about getting the job done right. That’s why every product and service we offer is designed to empower them to do their best.

Propeller is a well-established force in the drone mapping and worksite management space, but we’ve maintained that young, scrappy start-up energy that helped us establish that presence in the first place.

We’re certainly not a suit-and-tie environment, but we’ve got no slouches in our ranks, either. We’re fascinated with solving hard problems in uncharted territories. Each team member is empowered to approach, own, and solve problems creatively. We listen to each other, never stop learning, own our mistakes, and collaborate effortlessly.

Want to know what our team actually says about us? Check out our Glassdoor reviews.

Your Mission

Great engineering is our keystone. Your mission is to take our high-performing team to new heights. We work on difficult problems requiring unique solutions, and have a team of engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems.

Reporting to the VP of Product, you will be a true mentor and coach to our front end, back end, hardware, and infrastructure team leads. You’ll motivate and empower these teams, connecting their work to the customers they’re helping.

Internally, you’ll constantly communicate, sharing context and celebrating wins to the engineering department and broader business. Externally, you will grow our engineering brand so we can hire and retain the best talent. Finally, you will scale our team with speed, quality, and team happiness as top priorities.

About You

You are an experienced engineering leader. You have a track record of building, motivating, and mentoring high-performing teams. You are comfortable leading and developing managers and individual contributors. You’ve experienced multiple high-growth SaaS environments and helped organisations scale.

Responsibilities

Quality

• Hold yourself to a high standard of code quality and expect the same of your team. Bugs in production code are inevitable—but how do we minimize these? How do we measure the success and code quality across our engineering teams? This is where you come in- we want to encourage a mindset of continuous improvement in all employees.
• Improve planning, goal setting, retrospectives and accountability across all our engineering teams. The team has grown and many of our processes to ensure smooth, high quality work need to be upgraded.
• Measure/report/improve system uptime and product load time, and reduce incidents. Our software platform is feature rich but needs help behaving like other world class SaaS products.

Velocity

• Be creative with our engineers to build processes that support high-velocity teams and drive team engagement.
• Create a team structure that will allow for speed, quality and cross-team engagement.
• Facilitate collaboration across the smaller specialist teams within engineering. Enable multiple teams to work together effectively without things falling between the cracks.
• Ensure our teams are building and iterating quickly—and we’re integrating the customer into everything we do.

People

• Develop our future leaders by partnering closely with the engineering team leads reporting directly to you.
• Ensure every person in engineering is being developed and challenged. You must be comfortable providing regular feedback, both formal and informal. Establish a structure within the team where feedback is encouraged among peers as well.
• Grow an engaged team with a strong sense of purpose; they know what they are here to do and they enjoy celebrating wins as a team.
• Recruit, onboard, and retain a team of empowered individuals who buy into the company vision and are dedicated to achieving it.

Communication

• Be the link between the engineering teams and the business. Ensure your team understands the goals of the business and what other teams across the business are doing.
• Partner with the VP of Product. You’ll make sure engineering and design projects are aligned to company goals. Work together to ensure the product and engineering teams are working towards the same solutions and outcomes for our customers.
• Work closely with sales and customer success teams on any tech-related issues our customers are facing.
• Understand and communicate relevant market and technology trends; what’s coming in the future; and how Propeller can use them to our benefit.
• You are a highly credible engineer, and can hold our talented team to high standards.
• 8-plus years working in fast-paced, rapidly growing SaaS companies in leadership roles. You have seen what success looks like and know how to lead a team there.
• Our tech stack consists of Node.js, Reactjs, Python, Django, Pytorch, fast.ai, AWS, Terraform, WebGL, Docker, Kubernetes. You don’t need to be an expert in all of them, but should be comfortable leading a team of experts using these.
• Evidence of strong collaboration and negotiation skills. Our team is widespread, we are looking for someone who won’t let being in a different country get in the way of brilliant execution.
• You are comfortable cutting through ambiguity and interpreting imperfect information.
• You have made mistakes and learned from them. You can speak openly and humbly about what happened and how the problem was solved.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Nice to have: Experience working with integrated hardware and software teams.

About Us

Propeller is for everyone. We are an equal opportunity employer that actively champions diversity. We believe that our differences should be celebrated, and we encourage people to come exactly as they are.

We are very proud of our Glassdoor reviews, and we are constantly striving to improve our employee and interview experiences.

Our benefits include employee stock options, annual professional development budget, generous paid parental leave and a monthly telco allowance. Our open plan office in Surry Hills comes stocked with snacks, we host plenty of COVID-safe social gatherings and we’re minutes away from a dozen restaurants and bars.

Our employees work from home and from the office to make sure we’re collaborating effectively while ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our people. We take pride in being a great place to work, and we can't wait for you to join us.