Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

👋 Thanks for stopping by and learning more about this role at Sitemate! ✨🏗️

We'd love to hear from you 😊 👩‍💻👩🏽‍💻🧑🏿‍💻👨🏻‍💻

Brief overview of this role:

Reports to: CEO

Level: C-Suite (M14 on Sitemate's career framework)

Location: Melbourne, Australia. Hybrid, 2 days in office

Team: Engineering function of ~42 engineers across EPD. Direct line over Global Platform and EPD Ops (~20 people through two engineering function leads) plus the Staff Engineer layer. Tech Leads embedded in product teams roll up on technical standards and career

Remuneration: AUD 300,000+ (excl. Super)

🏢 About Sitemate

Sitemate builds best-in-class software and AI agents for the built world, helping construction, infrastructure and industrial companies work smarter and faster. Our mission is to multiply the engineering power of the built world.

Storm is the #1 data capture agent for the front line of the built world - converting audio, photos and videos into clean structured records.

With conversational support in-app and across SMS, Whatsapp and phone calls, Storm is shifting front line workers from paperwork and clunky digital forms, to natural language and multi-channel data capture.

Our core platforms are Dashpivot (safety, quality and field reporting), Gearbelt (fleet and asset management), Flowsite (no-code integrations), and the Sitemate mobile app for every worker on site.

We have strong product-market fit, generating thousands of new leads per month through word of mouth and organic channels. We are backed by Blackbird, with 200 people across 18+ countries and entities in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.

🚀 Why this role exists now

Sitemate’s product stack has evolved for the AI era - broken down into Platform, SaaS and Agent.

The question in front of us is no longer what we can build - it is how fast and how safely our delivery system turns what engineers and agents produce into shipped, trusted outcomes for customers.

This role owns that system, and the people who run it.

📝 The role

Sitemate's CTO owns technical direction and engineering execution across the business and is a member of the executive team.

This is a hands-on, builder-first executive role - you build systems that enable engineers to bring the company’s technology strategy to life.

You ship alongside your team, and set the technical bar through your own work.

At Sitemate, managers are player-coaches at every level up to and including the C-suite; time on the tools sharpens the bar you hold, it does not replace the leadership work.

🎯 What you own

At Sitemate the C-suite sets the company agenda and defines how we operate in their domain. For the CTO seat that means:

The engineering delivery system. Global Platform, EPD Ops, release engineering, QA infrastructure, security posture and engineering tooling

The engineering organisation. Org design, engineering career tracks and levels, compensation architecture within the company framework, and the hiring bar

The engineering operating cadence. Quarterly initiative planning for engineering, the breakdown standard beneath it, and the scoreboard that proves work moved a baseline

🤝 Who you work with

CEO. Your manager and your executive peer

Chief Product Officer. Your closest partner. Product owns what we build and why; you own how it gets built, how fast, and to what standard. You underpin the EPD roadmap, quarterly planning and the product-team structure

Staff Engineers and Tech Leads. The layer you build out and lead through. Staff Engineers carry technical direction across products; Tech Leads carry it inside each product team. You develop them, hold them to a bar, and delegate technical review to them as they grow

Engineering function leads (Global Platform, EPD Ops). Your direct reports for the shared platform and the delivery system

Operations. Your partners on org design, levelling, compensation and hiring

GTM and Marketing leadership. You keep engineering close to customers and revenue, and you show up in front of customers when it matters

⚡ What needs to happen

In rough order of leverage:

Turn AI-assisted engineering into throughput to production. Every engineer has AI coding tools. The job is to make the whole pipeline (review, deploy, QA) move at the pace code is now written, measured in changes shipped to customers, and to hold quality steady while it does

Decouple deploy from release. Feature flags, cohort and staged rollouts, fast rollback and trunk-based development across every product, web and mobile, so releases reach the people they are meant for and can be turned off without a deploy

Own the verification layer as one system. Strict typing across every repo, schema contracts at the write boundary, QA built into the release process itself, and a security testing cadence above the compliance minimum

Make records safe for many writers. Our forms are increasingly written to by several people and by agents at once. Field-level saves, conflict detection, live sync and clear attribution of who or what wrote each change

Shape the forward-deployed engineering model. How engineering ownership works as engineers sit closer to customers, and how the handoffs work with product and GTM

✅ What success looks like

By 90 days

You have shipped code in every main product repo and have identified the constraints holding back delivery, reliability and/or quality, in various parts of the stack

You are now owning the relevant initiatives in our delivery system and showing as assigned

By 6 months

Changes shipped to production per engineer are measurably up, and the production defect line has not moved with them

Release engineering rails are live

Quality is measured from production defects traced to the change that caused them, so the quality bar is a number

You have made at least one hire and one leadership decision that raised the bar

By 12 months

Strict typing and schema contracts are on across every product, and the compiler and contract layer are doing review work humans used to do

QA runs inside the release process with a shared eval harness for agent surfaces

Agent throughput is limited by review capacity you deliberately designed, validation is built into the engine architecture itself

🔧 Day-to-day

Personally review code and ship alongside your team

Run the weekly constraint review: the one binding constraint in the delivery system this week, what was done about last week's, and what the data says

Own quarterly engineering initiative planning and the breakdown standard beneath it

Coach Staff Engineers and Tech Leads on technical direction, review and running their own teams

Make build/buy/partner and vendor calls on the platform, tooling and AI stack

Represent engineering to the CEO, the executive team and the board, and translate company strategy into engineering priorities

Show up in front of customers and candidates as the technical face of Sitemate

🧬 How we build

Our Operating Principles are non-negotiable behavioural standards, written down and used in reviews. The ones this seat lives and enforces:

You ship your org chart. If we want an initiative to ship, we look at the team structure first. Org design is engineering work.

Grow from within. Before opening a search, ask whether someone on the team is ready or nearly ready.

Build the business like we build product. Engineering health is measured and reviewed like a product surface.

Every feature has a roadmap. Small shippable increments over big-bang releases, for platform and infrastructure work as much as for features.

Build AI native. All teams are empowered to build with AI. The CTO sets the guardrails that let them do it safely.

Fix before building. Critical production issues outrank new features, every time.

And the values you will be held to most visibly: Everything Engineered (we write things down: decision logs, frameworks,