Director, Engineering

Overview

Be Part of Our Next Chapter

For almost 60 years, our solutions have enabled impactful connections between leading brands and their customers. We are a global technology company focused on creating dynamic, smart, personalized and engaging customer experiences powered by our digital hardware, proprietary content management system and signage solutions. We work in over 50 global markets with 9 offices worldwide, and our global headquarters is located in Sydney, Australia.

Coates Group has the values of a family-owned business and the innovative spirit of a start-up, driving our purpose – Creating Connections. Empowering Partnerships. Always Evolving. We are industry leaders who have won awards and set records while remaining focused on continual growth and evolution. We are a 2x Australia Good Design Award winner and completed the largest hardware deployment in Quick Service Restaurant history.

We value diversity and strive to be curious, authentic and collaborative. We are imaginers, kindness enthusiasts, experts, creators, thinkers, challengers, collaborators and over-achievers. Together, we revolutionize how the world’s leading brands leverage technology to deliver the best customer experiences.

The Director, Engineering enables high-performing engineering squads to deliver reliable, maintainable, and high-quality software solutions. This role provides technical leadership, builds capability across engineers and technical leads, ensures adherence to engineering standards, and removes blockers that impede delivery. You will partner with Product, Delivery and QA leadership to achieve business and customer outcomes.

• Engineering Enablement: Ensure squads have the technical capability, processes, and practices to deliver reliably, removing blockers and supporting predictable outcomes in partnership with Delivery leadership.
• Engineering Leadership & Capability: Act as a chapter-style leader for engineers and technical leads, building capability, setting standards, and driving consistent engineering practices across squads.
• Technical Leadership, Debt & Design Quality: Ensure sound technical design and implementation, actively managing technical debt and addressing complexity.
• Quality in Delivery: Embed quality-by-design within engineering teams, partnering with QA to achieve agreed quality outcomes.
• Platform Health & Operability: Own the operational health of systems within scope, ensuring reliability, performance, and readiness across production and pre-production environments.
• People & Partner Leadership: Lead and develop permanent and partner engineers, including performance management, engagement, and effective integration.
• Delivery Flow & Dependencies: Enable squads to operate autonomously by removing blockers, managing dependencies, and improving delivery flow in partnership with Product and Delivery.

• Hands-on Technical Leadership: Leads with strong engineering credibility and models high-quality full-stack engineering practices.
• Execution Focus: Translates architectural direction and standards into practical, repeatable engineering practices at squad level.
• Problem Solving & Judgement: Quickly diagnoses technical and delivery issues, makes sound trade-offs, and removes blockers.
• People Development: Develops a high-performing team through clear expectations, feedback, and coaching.
• Collaboration & Influence: Partners with Product, Delivery and QA to align engineering effort to shared outcomes.
• Ownership & Accountability: Builds ownership for code quality, operability, and continuous improvement.

• 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years in engineering leadership roles managing engineers and technical leads
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience
• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale software platforms or digital products within complex environments
• Strong hands-on background in modern full-stack software engineering, building scalable web applications with cloud-native or serverless architectures (AWS preferred), CI/CD pipelines, and distributed systems
• Experience…