Senior Engineering Manager - Developer Experience

Octopus Deploy sets the standard for Continuous Delivery, empowering software teams to deliver value in an agile way. Over 4,000 organizations globally – including Ubisoft, Xero, Stack Overflow, NASA, and Disney – rely on our Continuous Delivery, GitOps, and release orchestration solutions.

We’re a profitable scale-up of 300+ people, growing steadily. We’ve built a high-trust, remote-first, and value-driven culture where people are given space to do their best work.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager (L5) to lead our Developer Experience (DevEx) team, reporting to the Director of Engineering. The team is cross-functional and mission-oriented, with engineers, a Principal Engineer, and a Product Manager working together to raise the industry standard for Continuous Delivery.

You’ll be part of a Product Leadership Team (PLT) with a Product Manager and Principal Engineer, sharing accountability for your team’s outcomes.

Your focus will be on people leadership, delivery, and coaching. You won’t be expected to code, but your technical background will help you guide engineers, make sound decisions, and support their growth.

The DevEx team’s mission is to help our customers deliver changes more frequently, more safely, and with greater visibility. They’ve already shipped some of Octopus’s most exciting features - from Config as Code for Runbooks to the soon-to-ship Ephemeral Environments, with Feature Toggles currently in progress.

As their manager, you’ll have the opportunity to lead a sustainable, high-performing team of autonomous engineers, holding them accountable for results while empowering them to shape how they get there.

A typical week might include

• Creating clarity on goals and priorities, and connecting your team’s work to Octopus’ strategy.
• Coaching engineers of all levels to grow their skills and careers.
• Supporting a high-trust, autonomous team in a remote-first environment.
• Guiding trade-offs and strategic decisions as part of a fast-scaling B2B SaaS product.
• Collaborating with peers in product, design, and engineering to uplift practices across Octopus.
• Ensuring delivery momentum on features like Ephemeral Environments, Feature Toggles, and new Progressive Deployment strategies.

What we’re looking for

• A leader who balances delivery accountability with people growth, ensuring teams ship reliably and deliver impact.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in a product-led environment.
• Skilled at managing in a remote-first setting, with empathy for distributed work.
• Strong technical grounding in software engineering, with the depth to coach effectively.
• A people-first manager who builds a culture of belonging, inclusion, and fairness.
• Able to spot dysfunction early and address it quickly, building sustainable, high-performing teams.
• Confident leading through organisational change, keeping people engaged and focused.

Why you'll love this role

• Lead a team that’s delivering some of Octopus’s most exciting features.
• Work on a strategically important product area, helping application teams deliver faster, safer, and with greater visibility.
• See your impact measured across delivery, people growth, and product innovation.
• As a scale-up, you’ll have opportunities to influence beyond your team — shaping initiatives across R&D and the company.
• Enjoy Octopus’s remote-first culture, generous benefits, stock options, and transparent pay structures.

Compensation

Octopus has an internally open and transparent system for compensation.

Any Octonaut can view the compensation for any role at any level. This ensures people doing the same work with the same skill get paid the same.

The compensation for this role is:

Level 5 (Senior Engineering Manager): Maturing: $205k AUD / $220k NZD, Performing: $230k AUD / $230k NZD

Salaries exclude Super and KiwiSaver.

Benefits include a minimum of 25 days annual leave, up to 10 days of paid sick and carers leave, 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave with flexible return options, and stock options. Learn more.

Interview Process

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role. We know interviewing can seem daunting, but rest assured we designed our interview process to move quickly while still getting you all the information you need.

Step 1 [30–60m] – 👋 Introductory call with Talent Acquisition to discuss your background, the role, and answer questions.

Step 2 [90m] – ☕️ Cultural interview with two senior engineering leaders, exploring your management experience (you’ll get the questions in advance).

Step 3 [60m] – 💻 Team Leads interview with a Principal Engineer and peers (e.g. Technical Lead, Product Manager), focused on how you communicate technical concepts and collaborate cross-functionally — no coding required.

Step 4 [30m] – 👥 Meet the Team session to connect with your future colleagues, share your approach to management, and ask further questions.

We are looking for people who live and work in Australia and New Zealand _to join our remote-first team. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship for candidates outside of these countries.