Head of Engineering

At Pet Circle, we believe pets deserve the very best, and the people who love them deserve a better way to care for them. Since 2011, we've grown from that single idea into Australia's biggest online pet retailer, with around 500 Pet Circlers across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, reshaping how pet parents discover, choose and receive what their pets need.

Pet care is a $15 billion industry in Australia, and as pet ownership continues to grow, so do the expectations of modern pet parents. They want expert advice, personalised experiences, convenience and reliability, all delivered seamlessly. That's where we come in. We're building the future of pet care through technology, innovation and a deep understanding of what pets and their people need. It's a big opportunity, and we're only just scratching the surface.

The role

Reporting to the Director of Technology, you’ll lead Software Engineering across Pet Circle, from the web and mobile experiences used by hundreds of thousands of pet parents to the integrations, supply chain and fulfilment systems behind them.

This is a scale-up leadership role focused on bringing greater structure, technical discipline and predictability to a fast-growing engineering organisation, without losing the pace, adaptability and builder mindset that got us here.

You’ll set technical and architectural direction, lead and develop a distributed engineering team, and partner closely with Product, UX and the wider business to turn commercial priorities into technical outcomes.

As part of Pet Circle’s Senior Leadership Group, you’ll also work alongside leaders across the business to shape strategy, influence key commercial decisions and help deliver company-wide priorities.

What You’ll Be Working On

• Bring structure to a fast-growing engineering team, introducing the right level of process to improve delivery, quality and reliability without unnecessary bureaucracy, and bringing the team with you through change.
• Set technical and architectural direction across web, mobile, integrations, supply chain and fulfilment, balancing long-term platform health with near-term commercial priorities.
• Own platform performance, scalability, security and technical debt, with rigorous approaches to testing, observability, incident response and engineering quality.
• Lead, stabilise and grow a distributed engineering team across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, building a culture of high performance, collaboration and psychological safety while coaching and retaining great people.
• Make engineering performance measurable, defining meaningful measures for throughput, quality and reliability and using them to continuously improve how the team operates.
• Stay close to the craft, contributing to architecture discussions, code reviews, prototyping and problem-solving when it matters. You’ll also bring modern engineering approaches, including AI-assisted development, into the team where they add genuine value.
• Stay connected to the customer and commercial outcomes, partnering closely with Product, UX and business stakeholders, while treating engineering investment, platform costs and customer-impacting failures with commercial discipline.

Our Stack

We’re predominantly TypeScript and serverless on Google Cloud, using Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, with a legacy Java estate on VMs that we’re deliberately reducing over time. Our infrastructure is managed as code and our CI/CD capability is strong for a team of our size.

You don’t need to have worked with this exact stack. We’re looking for someone who can recognise what’s working, know what to protect and have a clear view on what should evolve next.

What We're Looking For

• You’ve led and grown engineering teams of 10+ people, including distributed or remote teams, and know how to stabilise teams, navigate conflict and retain strong people.
• You’ve delivered high-performance, high-traffic consumer web and mobile products and owned platform performance, scalability and security at scale.
• You’ve worked in both high-growth or startup environments and more mature organisations, so you know when to introduce structure and when to preserve speed.
• You bring current, hands-on technical depth across backend, web, mobile, CI/CD and cloud architecture, ideally across AWS or Google Cloud.
• You’re still a builder at heart, with current hands-on technical curiosity demonstrated through prototypes, side projects or experimentation with new technologies. You’re already using AI and are pragmatic about where it adds genuine value.
• You bring strong commercial judgement, with experience managing engineering budgets or platform costs and balancing technical investment against business value.
• You’re an influential cross-functional partner who can bring people through change, communicate the "why" clearly and keep engineering connected to the experience of real customers.

Where you'll work

This is a Sydney-based role, working across our Wynyard head office and Eastern Creek distribution centre, which are pet-friendly, of course!

You will work onsite four days a week. We believe spending time together in person is important for building strong relationships, collaborating effectively, moving quickly as a team and having fun along the way.

A few good things

• Heaps of development opportunities - lunch & learns, secondments & unlimited learning courses via Go1
• Flexible working environment
• Up to 50% employee discount
• Product sample giveaways
• Pawrental leave and wellbeing leave
• Volunteer days for the causes you care about
• Fitness corporate partnership

Why you'll want in

Looking after pets, and the pet parents who love them, is what gets us out of bed. That energy carries into how we work, and into what your days here would feel like.

You'll own your patch and have the room to act on it. We move fast and decide fast, and we'd rather test an idea and learn from it than sit on it. You'll have rich, real-time data at your fingertips to back your thinking, and the freedom to chase an opportunity the moment you spot one. The best idea wins, wherever it comes from.

What Holds It Together Is What We Stand For

• We're better together
• We operate with humble hearts and hungry minds
• Pets matter, so pets and pet parents always have a seat at our table
• We're instinctively curious. Always

Everyone (& their pets) Welcome

We're better when we don't all think the same. Different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences make our work sharper and our days more interesting, so whoever you are, if this role excites you we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't tick every box. And if you need anything adjusted in the process to do your best, just say the word, we're happy to help.

Our story, like many good ones, starts with a human and their dog. Our founder, Mike noticed his Dad struggling to lug heavy bags of dog food home from the pet store. And so, in 2011, Pet Circle was born in Sydney with a simple mission: to make caring for pets as easy as possible.

And we've come a long way. Today, we're the #1 player in the Aussie online pet industry and one of Australia's top 5 eCommerce businesses.