Lead Software Engineer - Australia at Octopus Deploy

$140-$180,000 plus super

Full Time

The best product development job in the world? We think so.

We are looking for great Lead Engineers who understand distributed systems, scalability, event-driven architecture and eventual consistency. Octopus Deploy is the most popular deployment automation tool in the world. It's highly-available, fault-tolerant, fast, reliable and has a broad surface area. We are looking for people who can help take Octopus to the next level. At Octopus, everything we (and hopefully you) do can positively affect the lives of thousands of software developers and operations teams around the world. We are looking for people who live and work in Australia (or are returning to Australia and have permission to work here) to join our remote-first team. To discover what it's like working at Octopus, you can read our employee handbook and our people repository.

You will lead one of our development teams to work on Octopus Server, Octopus Cloud, or our commercial platform. Our teams are software craftspeople who care about doing things right the first time. Our team leads (hopefully that’s you!) are multi-skilled people who can lead, guide and mentor a team and its members in all aspects of software development and delivery, from prioritisation of work and scope management through to refactoring an awkward class, debugging a memory leak or re-architecting a persistence layer. If TDD, DDD, IoC and AAA are more than TLAs to you, Decorator, Observer and Composite don’t just sound like a new Three Stooges, and reflection is more than what you see in the mirror - and you can help teach what you know to other engineers - then we’d love to hear from you.

Working at Octopus may be different from any other job you’ve had before. In many companies, software engineers are treated as an expense to reduce or a revenue stream to increase. In contrast, Octopus is a product company built from the ground up by engineers, for engineers. At Octopus your effort will be appreciated because you are adding value to our products, which are our assets. Also, our customers are people just like us. This makes it easy to relate to our customers and understand what they care about most. We shape, bet, and build using a method inspired by Shape Up. We work in 8-week cycles, focusing on directed work for 6-weeks, and "sharpening the saw" with undirected work for 2-weeks at the end of each cycle. We remove unnecessary obstacles so you can work directly with customers who are developers just like us. You will probably be surprised at how collaboratively we work both inside and across our teams, even though our teams work remotely. We take pride in our hard-earned, friendly, consensus-building, and ever-improving remote-first culture.

Octopus is not done. Many of us came to Octopus thinking “it does everything I want, how can I possibly help?” Continual changes in the software landscape present a constant stream of opportunities for us to explore. We will continue to make Octopus the best tool in its class by increasing the value Octopus offers, pushing into new territory beyond deployment automation, all the while making Octopus easier and more delightful to use for both simple and complex scenarios alike. If you like solving distributed computing problems, building delightful user experiences, or anything in between, you can do that with us.

Octopus is not a startup. We do not need venture capital, we have been a sustainably profitable business from day one. We care about building a sustainable company and we do this by helping customers succeed, leaving increased revenue as a happy byproduct.

You will be a great fit for this role if

• You are an experienced individual contributor or leader in your current job.


• You have a firm grasp of the software trade using any language or toolset but preferably C# and TypeScript.


• You are comfortable making good decisions with general concepts like dependency, extensibility, and compatibility; and perhaps you are a specialist in an area of software engineering.


• You enjoy automating things like builds, tests, deployments, infrastructure, and operational tasks.


• You are able to work independently, motivating yourself and leading others to do high-quality work on time, communicating with your teammates when you need help or when you are ready for something new.


• You enjoy collaborating with other people to solve problems, challenging each other to discover the best solution for a problem, using a balance of passion, pragmatism, and empathy.


• You are a results-oriented person, someone who is focused on iteratively delivering valuable things to your customers, someone who willingly changes direction based on clear and transparent business information, and someone who helps others do the same.

You will enjoy this role if

• You are a software consultant or contractor looking to invest your effort into a successful and lasting product.


• You are a software team lead looking for a better balance of coding and leadership.


• You are a valuable individual contributor looking to expand your horizons with a world-class software company.


• You like a balance of freedom and responsibility, being treated as an adult.


• You want to do the best work of your life with other like-minded people.


• You enthusiastically accept radically candid feedback, feedback that is thoughtful, timely, and directly actionable, and offer the same benefit to others.


• You enjoy solving complex distributed computing, automation, security, performance, and usability problems.


• You like working with great tools like the latest versions of C#, .NET, TypeScript, and React, in the development environment of your choice.


• You like working with customers directly, helping them be successful with Octopus, even if success proves to be elusive.


• You enjoy doing things the right way from the very beginning knowing you are working on a valuable asset.