Technical Lead Engineer

Want to deliver tech with purpose, with people who care?
Join us in our mission to create solutions that help keep children safe online.

Who are we?

Headquartered in Perth, Australia, with offices globally including in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Qoria is an ASX listed global leader in child digital safety technology and services. We are a purpose-driven business, operating under the ‘Linewize’ brand in North America and Asia Pacific, the ‘Smoothwall’ brand in the UK, 'Octopus BI' in Sri Lanka and the ‘Qoria’ brand in EMEA. Our solutions are utilised by schools, school districts, and parental communities to protect children from seeing harmful content online, identify children at risk based on their digital behaviours and ensure teachers maintain focus and safe learning in the digital classroom. 30,000 schools and 7 million parents depend on our solutions to keep 25 million children safe in 180 countries around the world.

What’s the opportunity?

What’s the job: The job is to build and maintain fit-for-purpose software components, where build encompasses all work required to take a component from designed to ‘in use’.

They help the squad focus on priorities, ensure progress is made, escalate appropriately and hold the group to high standards.

Ownership: The Squad Lead owns the predictable, ongoing delivery and operation of high-performing team team.  They are the technical go-to person for both external stakeholders and the members of the team.  They work closely with the Engineering Manager to ensure their product fits customer and business needs while ensuring high quality, scalable and observable code is produced.

They must ensure that the other members of the team remain focused on delivery of their objectives and escalate appropriately when help is needed
In addition, they own the day-to-day tradeoff between quality, time-to-build and cost-to-own. They work in close conjunction with an Engineering Manager and other engineers, together ensuring that their changes are estimated accurately, delivered to specification, and have high quality and low cost of ownership. The question they must continually ask themselves is “Am I making the right engineering trade-offs for this component?”

Purpose: What am I responsible for?

Squad Drive: Ensure the squad remains focused on the right work.  

Interpret requirements, questioning when needed, adding both detail and clarity to improve quality.

Own the work from inception, through delivery and into production.  Fill in the blanks where they occur, whether that be in design, observability, future-proofing etc. balancing within the constraints of time and team capacity.

Team health: supported by engineering management and HR, they prepare team members for career progression, ensure a healthy balance of learning and doing, and ensure the processes within the team support excellence in delivery. 

System fitness: in consultation with other experienced engineers, they contribute and refine the product architecture in response to new requirements, emerging risks, and changing company priorities. The team, business and user have their needs met.

Predictable delivery: in collaboration with the Product and Engineering Managers (and especially during Discovery) they help negotiate the ongoing balance between quality, risk, and value to establish a predictable timeline. They then help to track and adapt to changes in the delivery plan, using early warning signals to respond to issues as early as possible.

Setting the standard: the Squad Lead provides a positive example to the team regarding quality of work outputs, enthusiastic engagement, meeting commitments, a commitment to continual improvement, and data-driven decision making. 

The quality of their work: They deliver work we are all proud of. Code is written to a high standard, and follows the conventions set by the team. Important aspects include, in consultation with their manager and other engineers (and especially QA Engineers), software that is easily testable and actually tested, and through that work correct and reliable. Depending on context, quality might include an emphasis on maintainability, readability, extensibility, generality, scalability and cost of ownership.

Fit-for-purpose Design: Supported by their manager and peers, they spend time mindfully designing software that meets the specification and coheres with other parts of the system. Design is detailed enough to estimate work. It is based on an understanding of impacts on customers and other components, and includes explicit identification of and mitigations for risks (e.g. privacy, security, dependencies).

Professional Growth: The baseload work of Senior  Software Engineers is of course the actual delivery of software. They should be a little better tomorrow than they are today. They therefore are responsible for identifying and critically evaluating tools, techniques, trends and patterns, and the intentional application of them that most benefits the component being delivered. As senior software engineers grow within the role, they are expected to have a positive influence on the professional growth of others and a positive impact on the team.

What Does Good Look Like?

Supporting both the PM and EM in regular, robust discussion, based on data, about the evolving scope and sequencing of work.  Ensuring a committed and engaged team, who take ownership of delivery commensurate with their experience. Stakeholders have visibility of measurable progress. High levels of time-on-task because the product is stable.

Standing behind what the team ships. Awareness of evolving best practice, and mastery of their tools. Learning from and teaching others. Advocating for what is right rather than what is easy or familiar. Actively identifying and good judgement in trade-offs between competing constraints on component delivery. Collegiality and intellectual generosity. 

A bias towards simplicity.

Growth within and beyond the role

As a Squad Lead Engineer gains experience, they will typically: be asked to work on even more complex products and integrations.

They will be part of the Lead Engineering Chapter sharing and driving best practices across the whole Early Detection and Intervention tribe.

This is just one of the opportunities in which the Squad Lead Engineer can grow in influence, experience and knowledge.

Typically, Squad Lead Engineers will continue on the technical track (Staff Engineer and beyond) or may look to move onto a management track (Associate Engineering Manager and beyond).

Skills Matrix

Necessary

React, MS Azure and its associated tooling, Core .NET, Experience of full-stack architecture design, Experience of working with and in overseas teams

Desirable

GCP and its associated tooling, GO, Angular, MySql and ASP exposure.

Why choose us?

• Deliver tech with purpose...

As a member of our Engineering team, your work truly matters. Your skills, knowledge and ideas will all help children stay safe online. It feels good to do good.

• With people who care...

Our Engineers are amazing! They’re also amazingly supportive. We all take ownership of our work, end to end. And at the same time, we really care about growing and winning together.

• Through work that you love...

You’ll get to work on solving problems for a global engineering team that has a user base in the tens of millions. And you'll be exposed to modern technologies and processes, in a fast-paced and supportive learning environment.

• And a career that you own...

This role offers so many opportunities to expand your skills and grow your career. You’ll get to attend local software conferences, paid for by us. And as you step up and take ownership to make things happen, you’ll carve out an incredible career.

Shortlisting will commence immediately.