Introduction:
Who we are…

Founded in 2002, ELMO Software is the trusted provider of HR technology solutions to 2,000+ mid-sized organisations and more than one million end users across Australia and New Zealand.With a comprehensive suite of ISO-certified solutions that span the full employee lifecycle, ELMO Software is designed to scale as organisations grow. Flexible and configurable, ELMO’s one-stop HRIS fits to your specific needs and workflows.Through powerful technology, automation, data and analytics, ELMO Software empowers HR professionals to play an integral role in company decision making.

Life & Culture...

At ELMO you will be joining an epic team with the opportunity to make a big impact. We foster an authentic, collaborative, fun working environment and being an ELMOnian means you're part of an amazing team that will push you to grow, support you with challenges and allow you to shine. Some of our benefits include:

• Hybrid work set up
• Paid Parental leave - 12 weeks primary, 6 weeks secondary
• Birthday leave, YOU day each year, as well as connecting people leave (up to 2 weeks working from anywhere)
• Inhouse Learning and Development initiatives
• ELMO Social and Diversity clubs
• Wellbeing initiatives
• Mental Health/EAP programs
• Flare Benefits (great discounts, novated leasing, salary sacrifice)

Our values:
Reimagine What's Possible - We believe innovation is human at its core. By staying open, fearless, and adaptive, we continuously push boundaries - while keeping people at the heart of everything we do.
Obsess over Customers – Everything we do is designed to positively impact our customers.
Help Others Thrive - Be they colleagues, communities or customers, we champion ways to help others thrive.
Be Fearlessly Optimistic - We bring unwavering positivity to any challenge, as we know it will drive meaningful change.

Please note: Our internal Talent Acquisition team has got this covered, we’re not open to using an agency for this role.

Description:
About the Role:
We're looking for a Technical Team Lead to drive technical delivery quality and day-to-day team leadership across our Engineering organisation. This role sits within the broader Engineering division, is based in Sydney, and reports to the VP of Platform Engineering and MLOps.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of full-stack software engineering, team leadership, and modern AI-enabled delivery. You will own technical direction for your domain, build and grow a high-performing engineering team, and ensure everything shipped is secure, scalable and production-ready.

The primary focus of this role (approximately 80%) is full-stack software engineering delivery — designing, building and operating enterprise-grade web applications and services. You will also bring working familiarity with data systems and cloud data platforms (approximately 20%) to partner effectively across data and analytics workstreams where needed.

As part of ELMO's AI-native engineering model, you will shape how AI is used in delivery — defining context, guardrails and orchestration approaches for each piece of work while upholding the same quality bar for AI-generated and human-written code.

Your Core Responsibilities:
Technical Architecture & Direction

Own technical architecture for your domain: API design, integration patterns, security model, infrastructure requirements.
Produce architecture decision records (ADRs) and API specifications.
Assess technical feasibility of incoming requirements and partner with Product Owners to codify precise, testable specifications.
Oversee and guide team-level architectural decisions, ensuring alignment with company engineering standards.
Own tech debt prioritisation and ensure adequate capacity is allocated.

Full-Stack Engineering Leadership

Lead the design and delivery of scalable, enterprise-grade backend services and APIs using modern frameworks (PHP/Symfony/Laravel, Node.js or equivalent).
Guide frontend engineering quality across React.js or equivalent frameworks.
Define and uphold RESTful API design standards, service integration patterns and system reliability practices.
Champion testing strategy across unit, integration and functional layers, ensuring automated quality gates pass before merge.
Drive CI/CD pipeline quality, deployment safety and progressive rollout practices.

AI Orchestration Planning

Own the AI orchestration plan for each piece of work: which components run in parallel, what context AI agents need, and what guardrails are required.
Produce agent orchestration briefs that engineers execute against.
Maintain and curate the team prompt library and coach engineers on effective AI-directed delivery.
Review AI-generated code to the same standard as human-written code.

Build Oversight & Code Quality

Accountable for all PRs being reviewed and approved before merge — AI-generated and human-written, same standard.
Own automated quality gates: linting, SAST/DAST, unit test coverage gates must pass before merge.
Custodian of team codebase: consistent production of high-quality, secure and maintainable code.
Zero critical/high vulnerabilities in production from code delivered under your oversight.

Data Awareness & Collaboration

Bring working knowledge of SQL, relational and non-relational databases, and cloud data warehousing (e.g. Snowflake, Redshift) to inform integration design decisions.
Partner with Data Engineering and AI teams to ensure application data flows are well-designed for downstream analytics and RAG-based use cases.
Contribute to data access patterns, schema design and data reliability considerations for features with analytics dependencies.

Release Safety & Deployment

Own deployment safety, rollback capability and feature flag strategy — all new features deploy dark and activate via progressive rollout.
Own go/no-go decisions for technical quality ahead of releases.
Accountable for post-deployment health monitoring within 24 hours of every release.

People Leadership & Team Development

Primary manager for engineers in your team — own day-to-day performance, expectations, feedback and coaching.
Conduct regular 1:1s, manage probation and performance improvement in partnership with EM and HR.
Identify and support promotion candidates; lead recruiting and own the interview process for team-level hires.
Build cross-training and knowledge overlap within the team; eliminate single points of failure.

Delivery & Execution

Own development estimation, technical approach and feasibility assessment.
Responsible for team OKR delivery in partnership with the Product Owner.
Own team flow metrics: velocity, predictability, cycle time — report to EM.
Primary owner of production incidents within the team; oversee to completion.
Identify and communicate technical, delivery and people risks proactively.

Skills & Experience

We'd love to hear from you if you bring:
Leadership & Delivery

Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams to deliver quality outcomes in complex, evolving environments.
Strong experience in technical planning, delivery oversight, risk management and stakeholder communication across cross-functional teams.
Strong leadership, coaching and mentoring skills, with a proven ability to grow engineers through feedback and development conversations.
Excellent communication and relationship-building skills across engineering, product and stakeholder groups.
Strong execution skills including prioritisation, work breakdown, accountability and delivery monitoring.

Full-Stack Engineering

Deep expertise in backend engineering using PHP (Symfony/Laravel), Node.js or equivalent enterprise frameworks.
Strong frontend engineering capability in React.js or equivalent.
Extensive experience in RESTful API design, system integration patterns and scalable service architecture.
Solid understanding of cloud-native architecture on AWS (Lambda, RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, EKS).
AWS Certified Solutions Architect or equivalent qualification highly regarded.
Strong testing strategy experience across unit, integration and functional layers using tools such as PHPUnit, Jest, Selenium.
CI/CD pipeline design and optimisation using Jenkins, Docker or equivalent tooling.
The ability to review both human-written and AI-generated code while maintaining a high quality bar.
Sound judgement in applying AI tools, modern technologies and engineering patterns in a practical, sustainable and architecturally aligned way.

Data Familiarity (Supporting)

Working knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
Familiarity with OLAP and cloud data warehousing solutions such as Snowflake or Amazon Redshift.
Comfortable contributing to integration designs that feed downstream analytics, reporting or AI/RAG pipelines.
Exposure to streaming or event-driven data patterns is advantageous but not required.

Culture & Behaviours

A collaborative, calm and resilient leadership style that builds trust, psychological safety and ownership within teams.
Proactive and resilient, with the ability to lead through ambiguity and manage competing priorities.
Curious and growth-oriented, with a willingness to learn, improve and adapt.
Committed to building a culture of constructive feedback, recognition, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.

Skills and Experiences:
ELMO Software Pty Ltd is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to join our team. We are also committed to advancing reconciliation at ELMO through our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). At ELMO, we are passionate about empowering HR with responsible, secure and safe AI, aiming to be among the first in Australia and New Zealand to achieve ISO 42001:2023 certification. Handling sensitive employee data necessitates strict adherence to our ISO 27001:2022 Certified security policies, making data privacy and security paramount in every role.