Associate Manager - Engineering

The Opportunity

We’re looking for an Associate Manager, Engineering to lead a small full-stack team in Melbourne while staying genuinely hands-on in the codebase. This is a true player-coach role: you write and review production code, and you develop the people around you, owning both the technical direction and the delivery of your team’s work.

You’ll lead a team of three to six engineers working across the front end and back end of nCino’s mortgage product, serving financial institutions in Australia and working alongside teams in the US and South Africa. You’ll guide planning, design, development and testing across enhancements and new products, and you’ll troubleshoot client issues as they arise.

This role sits at the intersection of technical craft and people leadership, with real scope to grow into broader engineering management as our Melbourne team expands.

Where you’ll work: This is a hybrid role based in our Melbourne CBD office, three days a week, with Friday as our anchor day. We’re not able to consider candidates based outside Melbourne or applications for fully remote work.

What You’ll Do

• Own architectural decisions for your team’s scope, guiding engineers on scalability, maintainability, and long-term cost of change
• Write, review, and ship production code across the full stack, holding a high bar in the review process
• Manage day-to-day execution and delivery, providing hands-on support where needed
• Right-size scope when constraints bite — working with Product and stakeholders to agree what’s achievable rather than defaulting to more people or more hours
• Improve team processes, collaboration, and code quality, with quality enforced through automated testing and CI rather than manual checks
• Line manage a small team of engineers: regular 1:1s, goal setting, growth plans, and performance feedback — including supporting an engineer who’s struggling, with coaching and root-cause understanding before process
• Support hiring for the team — screening, interviewing, and onboarding
• Mentor engineers across levels and set continuous learning plans for your team and yourself
• Use AI tools to support development activities — code generation, testing, debugging, and optimisation — and set the team’s practice for using them well
• Partner with Product Management on planning and release activities with cross-functional teams
• Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences alike

Ideally You’ll Have

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, with 6+ years of relevant software engineering experience and 2+ years leading engineers as a manager or tech lead, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
• Genuine full-stack depth — you’ve personally built and shipped both client-side and server-side code, recently, and you can hold a high review bar on both
• Strong system design and architecture skills: multi-tenancy, API design and contracts, authorisation and tenant isolation, asynchronous processing, and reasoning about failure modes and trade-offs
• Experience in a product engineering environment, building software used by paying customers
• A track record of improving development practices and processes to enhance team efficiency, collaboration, and code quality
• A track record as a coach and mentor of technical staff, with examples of engineers you’ve grown
• A dedication to quality and continuous improvement
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and interpersonal skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences

Desired

• Experience with the Salesforce Platform, particularly developing managed packages as part of the ISV Partner Program
• Experience with AWS and TypeScript
• Background in financial services, banking, lending or mortgage technology

In Return We're Offering

• Comprehensive private health insurance for you and your family from day one
• Group life, total and permanent disability, and income protection cover
• 20 days paid time off annually, plus 15 hours of paid volunteer leave
• Childbirth and parental leave, topped up to 100% of base salary
• Wellness Bucks 
• Access to our Employee Assistance Program, free and confidential for you and your immediate family

We're committed to building a team as diverse as the customers we serve. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences, and we make hiring decisions based on merit and potential - not on ticking boxes.

Our Culture: Live the Six

• Bring Your A-Game – delivering excellence and high performance
• Do the Right Thing – operating with integrity
• Respect Each Other – fostering a supportive, inclusive culture
• Make Someone's Day – focusing on customer success
• Always Have Fun – bringing energy and enjoyment to how we work
• Be a Winner – striving for success, together and individually