Senior Software Engineer Team Lead

Welcome to HotDoc 👋

Founded in Melbourne in 2012, HotDoc is Australia's largest patient engagement platform — connecting over 10 million patients with more than 21,000 practitioners across GPs, Allied Health, Dental, Specialists and Optometrists. Our platform handles millions of healthcare interactions every day, and the engineering behind it has to be reliable, secure and scalable.

We're a scale-up at heart — we move quickly, take real ownership, and care deeply about the work. We're now looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join one of our engineering teams in a permanent role.

About the Role

This role is built around three things: architectural and system design thinking, AI-native engineering practice, and the kind of self-starting leadership-by-example that makes the team better around you.

You'll lead, encourage and motivate a small team of engineers and design and build performant, modular systems across the full stack with direct ownership over a customer facing product that drives HotDoc revenue delivering against our multiyear strategy.  You'll work in an AI-native way — generating, reviewing, and refining code rather than writing from scratch — and you'll bring the judgment to know when AI is right, when it's wrong, and how to ensure it’s output works within the existing HotDoc system architecture to provide safe, secure and performant customer experiences. 

You’ll bring curiosity to ensure we are improving HotDocs systems and customer outcomes without being promoted. You're comfortable operating in ambiguity — working effectively in unfamiliar territory, finding a path forward even when one doesn't yet exist.

In your Team Lead capacity, you will take a leading role in defining and allocating work across the team and ensuring delivery of team goals is achieved. You will also lead through your own technical delivery with architectural influence, technical judgment, the example you set, and the way you raise the bar for the engineers around you. 

The pace is fast. The codebase is evolving. AI tooling is reshaping engineering practice in real time. We need engineers who roll with the punches and support the team through change — not engineers who need things to settle down before they can do their best work.

What You'll Be Doing

• Designing and building performant, modular systems — bringing architectural and system design thinking to the work, not just function-level engineering
• Team and people leadership  — defining and allocating work within the team, building a culture of high performance and supporting engineers in their performance. 
• Working in an AI-native way across the full SDLC — AI tooling as your primary authoring mechanism, with disciplined review and judgment on what it produces
• Owning work end-to-end — design, build, ship, monitor — driving it start-to-finish without waiting for direction
• Finding gaps and solving them — small or large, technical or process — without being asked
• Creating from nothing when the path forward isn't yet defined — taking a vague problem statement and turning it into a working solution
• Leading through example — raising the bar through code review, pairing, knowledge sharing and the technical judgment you bring to design discussions
• Participating in incident response and on-call rotation if required 
• Rolling with change and supporting the team through it

What You Must Have to Apply

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with senior-level work in a SaaS environment
• 2+ years people management experience, managing performance and allocation of work within a small product engineering team
• Ruby on Rails — essential. Current, hands-on and confident
• Ember — you’ll be working in Ember day to day, so current, hands-on Ember experience is highly regarded. We’ll also consider strong, recent experience in an equivalent framework (such as React or Angular) with a clear capacity to ramp up on Ember quickly
• Full-stack capability — you can move between backend and frontend without needing a handoff
• Strong architectural and system design thinking — you reason about systems, not just functions, and you can design for performance and modularity
• A current, AI-native engineering practice — you use AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) as your primary authoring mechanism, you have views on agentic workflows and prompt engineering, and you can review AI-generated code with discipline
• Comfort with ambiguity — you don't need things to settle down to do your best work

You're Just the Person We're Looking For If You Can Demonstrate

• You've already shifted to AI-native engineering — most of the code you ship is generated and reviewed, not hand-written, and you have a clear sense of what you trust AI to do and what you don't
• You think in systems and architecture — you reach for the right level of abstraction, you design for performance and modularity, and you can explain your tradeoffs
• You lead through your work as well as your role — you raise the bar for the engineers around you through your code reviews and the example you set, and you take real ownership of leading and supporting your team
• You find gaps and solve them without being asked — you don't wait for permission to make things better
• You can create from nothing — give you a vague problem and you'll come back with a working, well-designed solution
• You thrive on change — shifting priorities, evolving tooling, architectural pivots all energise rather than destabilise you
• Care about the patient, practice and practitioner experience your team's work enables — behind every feature is someone's health

What Do Our Employees Love About Working for HotDoc?

• A genuine mission — work that directly impacts the health of millions of Australians
• A collaborative, scale-up team environment where ownership and initiative are valued
• Real investment in AI capability — we want our engineers to be at the leading edge of AI-assisted engineering
• Flexible working — hybrid or fully remote arrangements supported; whichever works best for you
• Comprehensive Learning & Development budget and AI tooling budget
• Generous parental leave, wellbeing initiatives and a thoughtful approach to time off
• Real career progression — we promote internally and we invest in our people

HotDoc Is a Place Where You Can Be You

We celebrate diversity and encourage applications from all backgrounds, communities and industries. We're committed to building a team with diverse skills, experiences and abilities. If you have any access requirements or need any adjustments to the application or interview process, please let us know.

This role can be based anywhere in Australia. We welcome both hybrid and fully remote candidates equally. For candidates who choose to work hybrid out of our Melbourne HQ, we ask that you attend the office once a week to build relationships across teams. For remote candidates, we'll work with you to ensure strong team connection through regular online rituals and travel to HQ on a periodic cadence.