The Senior Development Lead plays a pivotal leadership role in guiding a multidisciplinary product development team to build the next generation of the company’s digital loyalty platform. Reporting to the CTO, the position combines hands‑on technical contribution with people leadership and agile delivery ownership. You will lead a cross‑functional team spanning backend, frontend, mobile, and QA disciplines, fostering a culture of creativity, experimentation, ownership, transparency, and psychological safety. The role requires strong communication and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across Australia and international time zones.
Responsibilities:
Lead a cross-functional product development pod, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and milestones. Coordination of workload through agile ceremonies as Scrum Lead, driving sprint planning, standups, reviews and retrospectives to deliver iteratively. Maintain an 80/20 split between people and delivery leadership and hands‑on contribution, stepping in technically where necessary (this will be primarily technical and hands-on in the beginning). Coach, mentor and develop team members, creating a supportive environment that encourages growth and innovation.Contribute as a hands-on coder, especially during the initial phase of team growth, establishing engineering best practices and setting the technical foundation. Provide guidance across Laravel, React, Flutter and native mobile development, advocating for an API first approach.Oversee integrations with GCP, Snowflake and select third‑party hospitality POS, ensuring reliability, scalability and security. Champion CI/CD practices and early DevOps culture, collaborating with our Australian implementation team to streamline deployments. Anticipate technical risks and issues, raising them proactively and collaborating on mitigation strategies. Act as a bridge between technical and non‑technical stakeholders across CX, Product, Marketing, Data and Operations. Translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for business leaders and team members. Foster transparency and open communication within the team and across the organization. Drive global collaboration by scheduling overlapping meetings and maintaining clear documentation across time zones. Cultivate a curious and driven culture where hypotheses are tested and learnings are shared. Implement and refine agile processes to improve velocity, quality and stakeholder satisfaction. Encourage autonomy and creativity, empowering the team to propose new ideas and challenge assumptions. Measure and report on outcomes such as feature delivery cadence, platform performance and customer adoption.
Skills/ Requirements:
Comfortable operating as a solo, hands-on developer in the short-term and transitioning to a full leadership role as the team expands. Proven experience leading cross-platform development teams, ideally within a start‑up or scale‑up environment. Strong technical background in Laravel, React, Flutter and native mobile development, with an understanding of API first design. Familiarity with AWS infrastructure and modern CI/CD pipelines. Demonstrated ability to guide architectural and technical decisions to balance short‑term delivery with long‑term scalability. Excellent communicator who can engage effectively with both technical and non‑technical audiences. Passion for coaching, mentoring and fostering an innovative, transparent and autonomous culture.
