Engineering Manager - Search Intelligence (AI)

Location: Richmond, Melbourne VIC, Australia; hybrid and flexible working

Company

hirify.global develops property search, real estate, mortgage, and property data products, including realestate.com.au, realcommercial.com.au, Flatmates.com.au, PropTrack, and Mortgage Choice.

What you will do

• Lead the AI Search Intelligence squad and deliver its roadmap and engineering outcomes.
• Coach and develop a multidisciplinary team of 9 direct reports across full-stack engineering, machine learning, and data science.
• Set technical direction and maintain standards for software quality, solution design, AI/ML deployment and evaluation, system health, and engineering compliance.
• Drive conversational search features, memory systems, query understanding pipelines, and semantic search capabilities.
• Partner with product leaders and adjacent engineering teams to shape the future integration of AI-powered semantic search and traditional search.
• Make technical trade-offs involving scalability, reliability, and the operational cost of AI-powered features.

Requirements

• Experience leading engineering teams of approximately 8–10 people across software, machine learning, and data disciplines.
• Recent hands-on experience coaching engineers through pairing, code review, and clear engineering standards.
• Ability to understand code across full-stack, machine learning, and data science environments.
• Experience designing and operating AI-powered applications, including integrating LLMs into products, evaluation-driven development, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
• Strong judgment in API design, cloud architecture, software engineering practices, and systems thinking.
• Strong collaboration, influencing, ownership, prioritization, and team-building skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid and flexible approach to working.
• Flexible leave options, including birthday leave and the ability to purchase additional leave.
• Flexible parental leave for primary and secondary carers.
• Because We Care program with volunteering leave, community grants, matched payroll giving, and community fundraising.
• Hackdays for developing and testing new ideas.