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Head of Platform Engineering

Stile Education

We’re looking for our new Head of Platform Engineering. Working directly for the CTO and closely collaborating with the Head of Application Engineering, you’ll be responsible for all of the infrastructure and tooling that underpins the operation and ongoing development of our modern web platform for science education in Australian (and increasingly American) schools. This is a fantastic opportunity for team leaders and senior technical leaders to step up into a high level technical director role.

Your challenge (should you choose to accept it)

At the most basic level, it’s to get kids thinking again. Thinking critically about the world around them, and making evidence-based decisions for themselves and their community. It’s definitely worth a look at why we do what we do. We do it by replacing what kids learn in their science classrooms with something far more modern, engaging and relevant.

Stile is used in 1 in 3 Australian secondary schools, with around 45% of students in years 7-10 subscribed. That’s quite some reach, and it’s a responsibility we take extremely seriously.

Each week, 200,000 students and teachers use Stile’s web platform, a number we expect will more than double in the next couple of years in line with our international expansion strategy. Our platform is held in high esteem in schools, but we’re busting to ship new features we can see will meaningfully help teachers support their students, far beyond anything they can do with classroom technology today. To realise this, we intend to scale our engineering organisation in line with our subscriber base.

Your challenge? Keep our web platform reliable, our infrastructure best practice. Ensure our developers have great tooling and we’re ready for an expansion into the USA.

You’ll be responsible for:

  • Maintaining our platform’s reliability as we grow. Our Service Level Objective is based on the number of students and classes affected by an outage, biassing our need for reliability into school hours (aka hours you’re probably awake).
  • Delivering changes quickly, and safely
  • Minimise toil and drama while managing all of our AWS and related infrastructure, including pro-active management of our production databases (MySQL and friends).
  • Anticipate new strategic needs and proactively develop new technical capabilities to meet them
  • Developer and ops tooling, and our Continuous Integration environment. We want to keep our growing engineering team productive and free from toil.
  • Providing DevOps assistance and advice on best-practice to application teams.
  • Budgetary management of your department and platform costs.
  • Maintain an excellent engineering culture that focuses on keeping things simple, but not simplistic.
  • Running a effective multi-talented team of platform experts while developing and honing your leadership skills with top-tier coaching and training from your manager and the wider leadership team at Stile.

In the next 12 months you’ll:

  • Allow us to meet upcoming US data sovereignty obligations by deploying a separate set of Stile infrastructure in the USA (currently we run out of AWS Sydney).
  • Move our main application to Continuous Delivery (currently it’s only ancillary services), and in doing so increase from 10’s of deploys per week to 100’s.
  • Get the average approved PR-to-deploy time down from 2 days to below an hour.

We think we need someone that…

  • Is right across best practice when it comes to SaaS infrastructure, but particularly how these practices come together to form solutions appropriate to our scale.
  • Has a track record of successfully implementing technical infrastructure solutions.
  • Proactively mentors others, and has shown how they can work across an engineering organisation to build consensus around new practices.
  • Wants to be a great manager and leader. Previous management experience is a plus, but not required.
  • Likes to get on the tools! We’re a small team, so this isn’t a pure management role.

Sound interesting?

Read on below then click apply. Be sure to include the following:

  • A cover letter (no more than a page) explaining why you're going to smash this role out of the park. Include a paragraph on which Behaviours of an Effective Stile-ist most resonate with you or which you disagree with and why.
  • Your resume
  • Address your letter to Daniel Rodgers-Pryor.

For more information on our hiring process, please refer to our hiring process.

We can't wait to hear from you!

We go into a bunch more detail below, but we’d encourage you to reach out for a chat, even if you’re not sure if you meet all of the requirements. Drop our co-founder Byron an email and we’ll go from there.

The Details

This is a leadership role

This is a leadership position within the company, reporting to the CTO. You’ll have a high degree of autonomy: expect to be managed to agreed outcomes, using the resources and team at your disposal.

We know a person’s immediate boss has a massive impact on their work experience, so we’re looking for someone dedicated to building and maintaining strong teams. We have a strong focus on management practice, using one-on-ones, feedback, coaching and delegation to elevate the performance and accelerate the growth of team members. We suspect it’s at least a small part of why our average tenure is around 5 years. You'll have opportunities to learn and practice using these techniques and others as part of our ongoing leadership training program. Pre-existing management experience isn’t required — this is a great opportunity to step up into a management position with tons of support — but a strong desire to be a great leader is essential.

Your team

The total engineering staff is around 30. We love building tech that actually helps educators and students, so we plan to grow this number organically over the next few years.

You’ll have a pre-existing direct team of five, plus two awesome interns, comprised of

  • Two staff engineers (Andy, Jeff)
  • Two senior engineers (Nick, Rabia)
  • A Tooling engineer (Shannon)
  • Two incredible interns (see our Women in STEM internship program)

We’re together-first and flexible (not remote-first)

We’re a together-first company. There is so much benefit to in-person collaboration when you’re trying to build Cool New Stuff. Practically, this means we like our teams in the office at least once a week, and preferably more. As a leader, we’d really like you in the office 3 days per week on average (though we don’t mind people working remotely for short stints) so that you’re available to your and other teams. Beyond this, we’re flexible - work from wherever suits you.

Your team will have a dedicated team office within our newly renovated CBD headquarters that you can set up as you wish, so you won’t need to hotdesk, and you'll always have a meeting room available.

Part of leadership at Stile is our monthly in-person leadership offsites, where, amongst other things, we dive deep into different aspects of people management and learn from each other’s experience. Around half of these are overnight (Thursday nights) and are planned well in advance. You have our commitment that they won’t be a waste of your time.

If you are not in Melbourne, but working in or very close to our timezone, and are prepared to travel on a regular basis, we are practised at accommodating this too. If you’ve got a specific arrangement in mind, get in touch and chat it through with us. If we can make it work, we will.

On Call

This position will require you to run an on-call roster, and at least in our current configuration, you’d be one of the people that are a part of that. Ultimately, how you set up the on-call roster will be your call, but we need the capability of responding to incidents that affect customers 24/7.

At present, we have slightly less than one after-hours on-call incident per month. Our culture of blameless post-mortems and actioning work that they generate means our platform has become more reliable over time.

Compensation

We’ll proactively discuss remuneration when we first chat. Broadly, this position will start at our Staff Engineer level. Our engineering salaries are benchmarked against major tech industry players every six months.

Everything else

Make sure you check out life at Stile and Engineering at Stile too!

How to apply

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