Head of Product Engineering

About Fat Zebra

At Fat Zebra, we simplify payments so merchants and platforms can scale with confidence. Our flexible, secure, and scalable payments platform supports over 100.000 merchants of all sizes across Australia. We help our customers navigate the complexities of the payment’s ecosystem-enabling them to focus on what matters most: growing their business. 

Our customers include Macquarie Bank, PayPal, MYOB, Sportsbet, Zip and Aussie Broadband, just to name a few. Join us to shape the future of payments in Australia, New Zealand and beyond. 

About the Role

Product Engineering owns what our merchants, partners and internal teams actually see and use: onboarding, merchant dashboards, reporting, administration and the product capabilities built on top of our payments platform. It is where customers form an opinion of Fat Zebra. A good platform is not enough if the experience around it is slow, confusing or unreliable.

As Head of Product Engineering, you will lead two to three cross-functional product squads working closely with Product Management and Design. You are accountable for the department’s engineering outcomes: its people, delivery, quality, technical health, security posture and operational resilience. Not just whether work is shipped, but whether it should have shipped in that condition.

This is not a delivery-coordination role. We need a leader who can raise the standard they hold themselves and each other to, while staying close enough to the work to know what is actually true.

Our Staff Engineer holds the architectural mandate across Product Engineering. You hold accountability for the department’s engineering as a whole. That arrangement only works if you are a genuine technical peer: able to challenge a design on its merits, change your mind when the argument is better and, once a call is made, make that direction real across the teams.

You will work closely with Product, Design, Platform Engineering and other senior technology leadership. There will be disagreement. Your job is to help the group reach better decisions.

Key Responsibilities include:

• Build the department the work requires. Hire carefully, set a clear performance bar and make sure every squad has the engineering leadership and range it needs
• Grow engineers and engineering leaders. Know what each person is trying to become. Give feedback specific enough to act on, create goals that actually develops them and have the conversation nobody wants to have when performance is not tracking.
• Own the technical health of your systems. Reliability, performance, security posture, test and deployment quality, and the debt ledger. You know where the risk actually sits and you’re making deliberate calls about it rather than discovering it during an incident.
• Make delivery more predictable. Work with Product and Design to sharpen scope, expose dependencies early and make credible commitments.
• Stay in the engineering. Be present in design reviews, architectural decisions, incident reviews, production debugging and planning discussions. Hands-on enough to hold real technical judgement but not so hands-on that the teams wait for you.
• Partner with your Staff Engineer as a technical peer. Architecture and technical direction are theirs. You engage with the substance, push back where you disagree, and once a call is made you make their authority real.
• Make operational excellence ordinary. Strong ownership, sensible on-call practices, useful incident reviews and follow-through should be how the department works.
• Shape the organisation, not just the roadmap. Turn company priorities into capability plans, hiring choices, investment decisions and a structure that can scale.
• Tell the truth. Give executives and cross-functional partners a clear view of progress, risk, trade-offs and options.

How you know you’ll succeed (KPIs)

• You provide engineering leadership that engineers trust, with clear decisions and strong coaching of senior engineers and emerging leaders.
• Dependencies are surfaced early, plans change for understood reasons and stakeholders trust the engineering judgement behind the dates.
• Engineering health that can be discussed with evidence. Measures such as availability, incident severity, time to restore, change failure rate, deployment frequency, escaped defects and security remediation are visible and moving in the right direction.
• The largest technical and operational risks are named, prioritised and being reduced.
• Consistent standards across squads for review, testing, observability, secure development, deployment and incident learning.
• Strong engineers are joining, growing and staying. Expectations are clear, poor performance is addressed and people can point to real examples of expanded scope, stronger leadership and promotion.
• Product, Design and Engineering challenge each other without becoming adversaries. Decisions are faster, trade-offs are explicit and customer outcomes are jointly owned.
• Engineers trust you because your technical judgement is real. Executives trust you because you are commercially minded, clear about risk and decisive when the situation calls for it.

About You

• You have led multiple product engineering teams, including managers or senior technical leaders, where customer outcomes and system quality both mattered.
• You built software before you led the people building it, and your technical judgement is still current across architecture, design patterns, distributed systems, cloud platforms and production operations.
• You have hired strong people, developed senior individual contributors and leaders, retained the people worth retaining and handled difficult performance conversations directly and fairly.
• You can make trade-offs between roadmap delivery, reliability, security, maintainability and technical debt.
• You have improved the way engineering operates. You know which practices change outcomes.
• You can work with a strong Staff Engineer. You are technically confident without needing to own every call, open to challenge and consistent in backing agreed direction.
• You understand the business consequences of engineering choices. You can connect a technical decision to customer value, risk, cost and company strategy.
• Experience in payments, fintech, banking, regulated technology or another high-availability environment is highly regarded but it is not a substitute for the leadership and technical judgement this role requires.