Director of Engineering, Product

About Airtasker Airtasker is Australia's leading platform connecting people who need work done with skilled people who want to do it, from furniture assembly to full home renovations. We are a Sydney-based team building a platform that has facilitated millions of tasks and helped hundreds of thousands of Taskers grow their businesses. About the role Two things are happening at Airtasker at once. We are rebuilding the core of the platform, and we are changing how engineering works. This role leads the second one for product engineering. You shape how the work gets done: how our Engineering Managers lead teams whose members each coordinate a fleet of agents, how engineers plan and review work they no longer type, and how much of our support and bug fixing we hand to agents outright. Your peer Directors lead our tooling and architecture, and you help steer that work from the CTO Leadership Team. We are well on our way to being an AI-native engineering organisation. We work spec-first, directing autonomous systems that author code and curating the context that makes them effective, and that is how a growing share of the group works today. The Evidence In September 2025, Airtasker engineers merged ~11 pull requests per person per month. By August 2026, that number had risen to ~50 - a fourfold increase in a year. In the first 27 days of August 2026 alone, the team merged 2,050 pull requests across 47 people. Headcount did not change. This came from how we work rather than from hiring. Yes, it measures output, not value. On the eight-level agentic maturity scale we use internally, we currently place ourselves at five to six. We are equally honest about where we have stalled. The remaining bottleneck is not model capability, it is us: how we plan, how we hand work to agents, and how much of our systems knowledge still lives only in people's heads. The Group Three teams covering acquisition, activation and retention. Around 21 people, five direct reports (three Engineering Managers and two senior engineers), split between Sydney and Hanoi. The teams are full-stack and own their verticals end to end, across backend, web and mobile. This group is more than half of everyone who writes code at Airtasker. A small number of people carrying a large share of the company's output, which is roughly the point: we would rather have a leader who knows every engineer by name than another layer of management. You will report to the CTO and sit on the CTO Leadership Team alongside the Director who leads our core marketplace platform, the Director who leads our operational teams across SRE and Data Platform, and the Director who leads decision science. Platform and architecture investment is decided at that table, which is where you make the case for what your teams need. What you'll do Work out what engineering management looks like in an agentic team. Coordinating work across people matters less now, and the quality of intent, context and review matters more. You would do that alongside three Engineering Managers who know our teams and our customers well, and feed what you learn back into how we grow and hire engineering leaders. There is no settled playbook for this anywhere yet, which is what makes it the largest part of the role and the hardest. Change how engineers work with agents. We want one engineer directing a vertical slice end to end, running agents in parallel, with review happening at the plan rather than only at the diff. Getting there means new habits, and habits do not change because a director announced a new process. Take support and bug fixing off humans. We think a large share of our triage and fixing can be handed to coding agents. Nobody here has proved it yet. You would lead that from hypothesis to production. Partner with our product and design leaders on how we scope and sequence work. Agentic delivery breaks when intent is vague, and no amount of tooling fixes that upstream. Bring rigour to how we measure engineering perfor