Three teams, two of which I founded — one owning the shared services behind SEEK's hirer products, the other centralising run-the-business work that used to sit with every team separately — plus the department-wide working group that sets how that work is prioritised.
Stakeholders have included our Director of Engineering, Heads of Engineering, Principal Architect, CTO, Distinguished Engineer and MD of Tech.
Hirer Shared Services
Founded in July 2022 with two Staff Engineers and myself, and grown to eight across five Staff and three Software Engineer seats. The team owns the shared platform services the hirer products are built on.
- Managed the program migrating 16 teams off legacy .NET monoliths onto a TypeScript microservice architecture, and took ownership of three long-neglected systems with no prior domain knowledge in order to plan their decommissioning.
- Cut the number of teams still depending on the legacy ad platform from 13 to 4 in two quarters.
- Drove P1 and P2 incidents to a record low, and instituted the post-incident review process now used across the department.
- Migrated the last Linux estate off its legacy hosting and retired a monitoring stack onto Datadog, taking a further USD 1,300 a month out of the bill.
Hirer Tech Uplift
I wrote the business case for centralising run-the-business work — dependency upgrades, vulnerability remediation, code health — across an estate of roughly 530 repositories owned by 27 teams, then formed and grew the team that does it.
- Measured what was actually automatable before building anything: 1,762 of 1,855 dependency pull requests across 88 repositories, or 95%.
- Ran the canary that merged those upgrades without owner intervention, recovering around ten engineer-hours per sprint.
- Established a code-quality baseline across 577 repositories.
Hirer RTB
I built and led the department-wide working group for run-the-business work — the standing question of how much of each team's capacity goes to keeping what already exists healthy, and on what.
- Led an initiative that cut my domain's annual cloud cost by AUD 1.1M.
- Drafted the quarterly guidance that every team in the department now sets its run-the-business objectives from.
- Built the working group and the monthly metrics review that made the department's tech metrics — cloud cost, security, operational availability — transparent and reviewable.
- Drove critical-to-low security vulnerabilities down to 18 across the department, and overdue ones to zero.
Other
- Helped create the organisation's BAU tech guidance and its IC engineering pathway, as part of the respective councils.
- On the hiring team for three of the department's five Senior Staff Engineers — its most senior engineers below the Principal Engineer.
- Co-designed the technical and behavioural interviews used by the graduate program.
- Mentored my direct reports and mentees and created mobility opportunities for them — Staff Engineers, Lead Engineers, a Senior BA, Senior Software Engineers, Software Engineers, Graduate Engineers and contractors.
