Technical Team Lead (React/Node)

Introduction
Who we are

Founded in 2002, ELMO Software is the trusted provider of HR technology solutions to 2,000+ mid-sized organisations and more than one million end users across Australia and New Zealand.With a comprehensive suite of ISO-certified solutions that span the full employee lifecycle, ELMO Software is designed to scale as organisations grow. Flexible and configurable, ELMO's one-stop HRIS fits to your specific needs and workflows.Through powerful technology, automation, data and analytics, ELMO Software empowers HR professionals to play an integral role in company decision making.

Life & Culture

At ELMO you will be joining an epic team with the opportunity to make a big impact. We foster an authentic, collaborative, fun working environment and being an ELMOnian means you're part of an amazing team that will push you to grow, support you with challenges and allow you to shine. Some of our benefits include:

• Hybrid work set up
• Paid Parental leave - 12 weeks primary, 6 weeks secondary
• Birthday leave, YOU day each year, as well as connecting people leave (up to 2 weeks working from anywhere)
• Inhouse Learning and Development initiatives
• ELMO Social and Diversity clubs
• Wellbeing initiatives
• Mental Health/EAP programs
• Flare Benefits (great discounts, novated leasing, salary sacrifice)

Our values:

• Reimagine What's Possible - We believe innovation is human at its core. By staying open, fearless, and adaptive, we continuously push boundaries - while keeping people at the heart of everything we do.
• Obsess over Customers - Everything we do is designed to positively impact our customers.
• Help Others Thrive - Be they colleagues, communities or customers, we champion ways to help others thrive.
• Be Fearlessly Optimistic - We bring unwavering positivity to any challenge, as we know it will drive meaningful change.

Please note: Our internal Talent Acquisition team has got this covered, we're not open to using an agency for this role.

Description
Role Overview:

This is an exciting opportunity to join the ELMO Software Recruitment team in Melbourne as a Technical Team Lead (JavaScript) of a small team of three developers. This role is a mixture of 70% leadership and 30% hands-on development. Reporting to the Engineering Manager, the Technical Team Lead (TTL) in Recruitment is the single point of accountability for technical delivery quality and the day-to-day manager of their team. The TTL owns architecture, build oversight, code quality gates, release safety, and direct people management of their engineers. The TTL's role includes AI orchestration planning, determining how AI agents will be structured and directed for each piece of work and ensuring that AI-generated code meets the same standards as human-written code.

AI Orchestration Planning

• Owns the AI orchestration plan for each piece of work: which components in parallel, what context AI agents need, what guardrails required.
• Produces the agent orchestration brief that engineers execute against.
• Accountable for the effectiveness of AI-directed delivery within their domain.
• Owns prompt library curation for their domain.

Build Oversight & Code Quality

• Accountable for all PRs being reviewed and approved before merge, AI-generated and human-written, same standard.
• Accountable for all code meeting ELMO's coding, security, and architectural standards.
• Owns automated quality gates: linting, SAST/DAST, unit test coverage gates must pass before merge.
• Accountable for correctness of implementation against requirements and architecture.
• Custodian of team codebase: consistent production of high-quality code and associated metrics.
• Accountable for security vulnerability rate at team level, zero critical/high vulnerabilities in production from code delivered under this TTL's oversight.

Testing & Validation Oversight

• Accountable for test coverage completeness and quality across the team.
• Ensures automated security scanning runs in CI/CD pipeline.
• Validates non-functional requirements: performance under load, error handling robustness, observability and logging, infrastructure readiness.

Release Safety & Deployment

• Accountable for deployment safety and rollback capability.
• Owns feature flag strategy: all new features deploy dark, activated via progressive rollout.
• Owns go/no-go decision for progressive rollout (technical quality).
• Accountable for post-deployment health: error rate monitoring, performance baseline comparison, customer impact assessment within 24 hours.

People Management

• Primary manager for engineers in their team.
• Owns day-to-day performance management: expectations, feedback, coaching.
• Primary go-to person for team questions; primary resolver of blockers and dependencies.
• Conducts regular 1:1s with direct reports.
• Manages probation and performance improvement in partnership with EM and HR.
• Identifies and supports promotion candidates.
• Leads recruiting for their team; owns interview process for team-level hires.
• Maintains cross-training and knowledge overlap within their team; ensures no single points of failure in critical domain areas.

Delivery

• Owns development estimation, technical approach, and feasibility assessment.
• Provides high-level solution and estimation of development effort for prioritisation.
• Responsible (with PO) for team OKR delivery.
• Responsible for tech initiative inclusion in the roadmap.
• Responsible for team quarterly initiatives and delivering agreed projects in timeframes.
• Primary owner of production incidents within the team; oversees to completion.
• Owns team on-call and escalation definition.
• Identifies and communicates technical risks within their team's scope.
• Owns team flow metrics: velocity, predictability, cycle time - reports to EM.
• Ensures accurate time tracking and effort category classification within their team.

Quality of Applications

• Responsible for quality of applications/components managed: defect escape rate, incidents, observability, security vulnerabilities.
• Drives team quality health practices and quality metrics.

Compliance

• Ensure compliance with ELMO's information security privacy policies and procedures.
• Ensuring day-to-day wellbeing and compliance with ELMO policies, timesheets, time and attendance

Technical skills:

• Strong hands-on engineering background, including React frontends, Node backends and modern web application development.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, API design, integration patterns and secure application design.
• Ability to translate business requirements into technically precise, testable specifications.
• Experience reviewing code at scale and upholding consistent quality standards across human-written and AI-generated code.
• Strong judgement in AI-assisted development, including orchestration, prompt direction and critical review of generated output.
• Strong stakeholder communication and people leadership capability.

Nice to have:

• Experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Codex and familiarity with GraphQL.
• Agentic Development: Experience leading teams that work alongside specialised AI agent workflows, integrating autonomous tooling into daily sprints to reverse-engineer specs into production-ready code across backend, frontend, and design systems.
• Spec-Driven Engineering: Proven track record of applying spec-driven development and behaviour-driven design (BDD) to ensure high code quality, automated testing rigour, and adherence to strict API standards.
• AI Integration & Best Practices: Capability to continuously refine and elevate engineering standards in an AI-native environment, leveraging edge-case mapping, business context, and parallel automated testing to speed up feature delivery.

Apply now and be part of the team shaping the future of work at ELMO!

ELMO Software Pty Ltd is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to join our team - a commitment reflected in our Reconciliation Action Plan .
As the first software company in Australia and New Zealand to achieve ISO 42001:2023 Certification, we're passionate about responsible, secure and safe AI. Key to this role is an awareness of data privacy and security, as you'll be working with sensitive employee data in accordance with our ISO 27001:2022 Certified security policies.