Join the PITech Reliability Engineering team that builds the automation, tooling, and operational capabilities that make Vanguard PI's systems more resilient and its engineers more effective. This is a player-coach role: you will manage a team of senior engineers while carrying your own technical workstream — writing code, shipping operational tooling, debugging production systems, and delivering alongside the team.
The team operates at the intersection of multiple business areas and delivers horizontal capabilities adopted across the department. You will navigate competing priorities across partner teams, align on adoption timelines, and represent the team's roadmap to leadership. The engineers you inherit are strong individual contributors who need a leader capable of building cohesion, creating stretch opportunities, and coaching behavioral growth — not just reviewing pull requests.
This is not a role where you delegate all technical work. You must be technically excellent enough to earn credibility through your own contributions while simultaneously developing the people and practices that make the team greater than the sum of its parts.
Core Responsibilities
- Leads, coaches, and develops a team of engineers. Establishes clear performance expectations, provides ongoing feedback, and supports career growth. Conducts performance reviews and makes compensation decisions in alignment with Human Resources policies.
- Personally contributes to the team's technical delivery — writing code, building and shipping operational tooling, and carrying individual workstreams alongside team members. Maintains hands-on fluency with the team's systems and codebase.
- Guides solution design, supports engineering decision-making, reviews technical approaches, and provides practical coaching to engineers on both technical and behavioral dimensions. Develops future leaders by creating deliberate stretch opportunities and coaching engineers through collaboration, delegation, and influence skills.
- Partners closely with product leaders, technical leaders, and business stakeholders across multiple product families to clarify priorities, align expectations, and drive adoption of the team's platform capabilities. Represents the team's roadmap and negotiates prioritization across competing organizational demands.
- Owns responsibility for team outcomes, ensuring work is prioritized, risks are managed, and commitments are delivered reliably. Sequences the roadmap to balance near-term delivery with longer-term platform investments.
- Fosters a culture of psychological safety, learning, and continuous improvement. Cultivates a team that operates cohesively rather than as parallel solo contributors. Reinforces clear working agreements and sustainable team rhythms.
- Identifies and resolves impediments that affect delivery, quality, or team effectiveness. Escalates complex issues appropriately and simplifies constraints to maintain momentum.
- Promotes high standards of engineering quality, including reliability, testability, and operational readiness. Reinforces sound development practices including automated testing, observability, and production support ownership.
- Participates in departmental planning, staffing discussions, and operational initiatives. Contributes to improving engineering practices and organizational effectiveness across the SRE group.
- Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
- Minimum 10 years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, or platform/infrastructure engineering. Previous people leadership experience required.
- Demonstrated ability to personally deliver production-grade software while simultaneously managing a team — not solely a management track or solely an IC track.
- Strong stakeholder management and cross-organizational influence skills. Experience navigating competing priorities across multiple partner teams and driving adoption of shared capabilities.
- Proven track record of developing engineers — particularly coaching senior ICs through behavioral growth areas such as collaboration, delegation, and developing others.
- Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent combination of training and experience.
Nice to Have Skills
- Experience in observability, reliability engineering, or automation domains
- Cloud infrastructure fluency (AWS preferred — ECS, Lambda, infrastructure-as-code)
- Familiarity with SRE practices: incident response, chaos engineering, production readiness, SLO-driven operations
- Program/product management sensibility — ability to sequence a roadmap and drive platform adoption
- Fluency in agentic tooling and AI-augmented engineering workflows
Special Factors
Sponsorship
Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.
About Vanguard
At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission—we're on a mission.
To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.
How We Work
Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.
