Engineering Lead in Sydney, New South Wales at Blinq

Blinq is the AI contacts app for people who meet people.

We're on a mission to unlock the world's relationship potential. So much of what's possible in the world is locked inside relationships that never quite happen. A missed conversation, a forgotten follow-up, the right person at the wrong time. We're building so those chances aren't left to chance.

What started as the world's #1 digital business card is now used by 4 million professionals and at 93% of the Fortune 500. We've raised $45m+ from Blackbird, Square Peg, HubSpot Ventures, and Touring Capital.

Learn more: https://blinq.me/

• You want to be part of an AI-native company at an inflection point. Big enough to have real momentum, customers, and resources. Small enough that the work you do shapes where it goes from here.
• You want to do the best work of your life alongside people doing the same. We hold an unusually high bar for talent and we hire people who treat that as a feature, not a threat.
• You want to build something globally ambitious from a part of the world that doesn't always think this big. Our team is in Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco, and New York, and we're betting that the next category-defining company in our space comes from Australia.
• You want to work in person, on purpose. Three days a week in the office, two wherever works for you. Creative energy and momentum compound face to face.

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead to shape the technical foundations behind Blinq’s next stage of growth. You’ll work across architecture, platform engineering and developer experience, helping our squads build systems that are reliable, maintainable and ready to scale.

This is a deeply technical, hands-on role. You’ll work through system designs, review and contribute code, investigate difficult problems and help engineers make sound decisions about how we build. You’ll bring the judgment to know when to invest in a stronger foundation, when to simplify and when to ship.

With a strong platform engineering background, you’ll connect decisions about infrastructure, data, services and deployment to their impact on product development. Your work should make it easier for every squad to deliver high-quality software.

You’ll also lead practical improvements in how we use AI throughout engineering, testing approaches in real workflows and turning what works into shared tools and practices.

We’re looking for someone who has been an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager or Engineering Director and has maintained strong technical depth. You enjoy developing engineers through the work itself, alongside clear feedback and consistent people leadership.

Our engineers work in squads, with squad leads guiding day-to-day priorities and delivery. The Engineering Lead works across those squads, helping resolve shared technical challenges, strengthen engineering standards and make decisions that hold up across the wider platform.

All engineers report to the Engineering Lead, with fortnightly 1:1s providing consistent feedback, development and support.

Our player-coach approach means contributing directly while helping others become stronger engineers. You might pair on a difficult implementation, challenge a system design, investigate a production issue or build a tool that removes a recurring bottleneck. You’ll give squad leads the context and support to make good decisions and own their delivery.

Lead technical direction and architecture

• Work with engineers and squad leads to design systems, review proposals and make clear trade-offs across performance, reliability, security, cost and complexity.
• Guide how services, APIs and data models evolve as our products grow.
• Identify technical dependencies across squads and help teams solve problems with the wider system in mind.
• Turn technical debt into focused improvements, balancing longer-term architecture with immediate product needs.

Stay hands-on with engineering

• Contribute code, prototypes and tooling where your experience can unblock progress or establish a better approach.
• Review code and designs with a high bar for correctness, testing and maintainability.
• Pair with engineers on complex problems, helping them build both the solution and their technical judgment.
• Work through production issues, identify root causes and help put lasting improvements in place.

Strengthen our platform and developer experience

• Improve CI/CD, development environments and internal tooling so engineers can build, test and release with confidence.
• Help evolve cloud infrastructure and deployment practices to support reliable, efficient operations.
• Strengthen observability and use production evidence to identify reliability and performance bottlenecks.
• Reduce manual work and unnecessary complexity through automation and well-designed shared capabilities.

Drive AI-enabled engineering

• Trial and implement AI-assisted workflows for development, testing, code review, documentation and debugging.
• Build repeatable practices and tooling that help the whole team benefit from what works.
• Set clear standards for validating generated code, protecting sensitive information and maintaining human ownership of technical decisions.
• Measure the effect on delivery time, review effort and software quality, and adapt when an approach creates more work than it saves.

Develop technical capability across the team

• Coach engineers and squad leads on system design, debugging, operational ownership and technical decision-making.
• Use fortnightly 1:1s to provide direct feedback, support development and set clear expectations.
• Build consistent engineering practices across squads while preserving their ownership of implementation and delivery.
• Support hiring and onboarding with a strong focus on technical capability, judgment and craft.

• Strong software engineering foundations and recent hands-on experience designing, building and operating production systems.
• A strong platform engineering background, with direct experience improving cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, developer tooling and reliability.
• Previous experience as an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager or Engineering Director, with responsibility for people management and technical outcomes.
• The ability to move confidently between architecture, code and production behaviour, and explain the trade-offs at each level.
• Experience evolving systems in a startup or scale-up, including making pragmatic decisions about technical debt, scalability and delivery.
• Practical experience introducing AI into engineering workflows, with evidence of how it improved the team’s work.
• A track record of growing engineers’ technical capability through pairing, code review, feedback and coaching.
• Strong product judgment: you can connect technical investment to customer needs and business priorities.
• A preference for simple, maintainable solutions and the confidence to challenge unnecessary complexity.

• Squads make sound technical decisions with clear ownership and fewer unresolved dependencies.
• Our platform becomes easier to develop on, operate and extend.
• Build and release workflows are faster and more reliable, with less manual intervention.
• Technical improvements produce measurable gains in reliability, performance or engineering effectiveness.
• AI helps engineers deliver better work, with quality and review effort considered alongside speed.
• Engineers grow in technical judgment, confidence and ownership.