About Berny

Berny is a Melbourne-founded product company building AI-powered products for a wide range of customers. We pair deep domain expertise with the best AI tools available to solve problems conventional software can't, and we use AI as a force multiplier across our own engineering as much as we build it into the products themselves.

We're now scaling our Clark engineering function, and you'd be one of the people we're betting on to make that work.

Our values: Harmonize · Innovate · Lead.

Job Summary

The Software Engineering Manager is responsible for leading cross functional, cross discipline teams to design, build, and deliver high-quality software solutions across multiple products and product types.

Our teams are highly innovative not just on what they are building but how they are building it. We're proud to be on the cutting edge of new technologies and pioneers in Agentic Engineering processes, trialing and providing our engineers with the latest tools and technology available. Nothing is sacred except the compelling desire to build innovative and beautiful software that is a joy to use, not a burden. The engineering process here is itself a product we build and iterate on, not a fixed playbook we adopt.

This role combines people management, technical leadership, and project execution, ensuring teams are productive, aligned with business goals, and continuously improving. The ideal candidate has a strong technical background, proven leadership experience, and the ability to scale teams and processes with out of the box thinking. If you think of yourself as an energetic technologist with an entrepreneurial mindset, an early adopter, and someone who may have been held back in the past, this might be your chance.

You will work across more than one product in your first year. You will think about software, organization, and product as one system with feedback loops, and you will treat agile as a set of principles to reason from rather than a process to perform.

Competitive compensation package commensurate with experience. 

Communication

This is your biggest skill and most important responsibility. You will often be the voice of the team, inspiring, empowering and motivating people to take risks, to challenge assumptions, to create a safe place for engineers to be imaginative in an industry that historically rewards conservative thinking.

Listen with the intent to learn. Speak with the intent to help.

Team Leadership & People Management

•         Lead, mentor, and grow a team of software engineers, designers, DevOps, across different experience levels

•         Conduct performance reviews, career development planning, and regular 1:1s

•         Foster a culture of creativity, collaboration, and continuous learning

•         Drive hiring, onboarding, and retention strategies, including hiring engineers who work productively with AI agents on production code

Delivery & Execution

•         Own the delivery of software projects from planning to release

•         Ensure projects are completed on time, within scope, and meet quality standards

•         Manage team capacity, planning, and prioritization in a truly Agile environment

•         Remove blockers and ensure smooth execution

Technical Leadership

•         Provide guidance on system design, architecture, and best practices

•         Review and approve technical designs and key architectural decisions

•         Ensure code quality through reviews, standards, and engineering best practices

•         Collaborate with Tech Leads on implementation strategies

•         Make deliberate decisions about which work belongs to engineers and which is delegated to AI agents, with evals and guardrails to know if it's working

Process & Operational Excellence

•         Implement and improve the team's planning, review, and delivery process from first principles, name the problem each ceremony solves, and drop or change practices that don't earn their keep

•         Establish engineering metrics (cycle time, defect rates, deployment frequency, agent-assisted output share)

•         Drive continuous improvement in development workflows and tools

•         Ensure efficient CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices

Quality, Security & Reliability

•         Promote best practices in testing, code quality, and system reliability

•         Ensure adherence to security standards and data protection practices

•         Oversee incident management and post-mortem processes

Strategic Contribution

•         Contribute to engineering strategy and roadmap planning

•         Identify opportunities for innovation and technical improvements

•         Support scaling of systems, teams, and processes as the engineering organization grows, including how engineering process scales as we go from two product teams to four

•         Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

•         7+ years of software development experience, with 4+ years in a management role

•         Strong background in modern software development practices and methodologies

•         Experience managing Agile teams and delivering complex software projects, ideally including teams that have changed their own process based on what they learned

•         Strong leadership and people management skills

•         Solid technical foundation in software architecture and development

•         Excellent communication and stakeholder management

•         Experience with cost management on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

•         Understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and modern development tools

•         Hands-on experience integrating AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) into a production engineering workflow, with a view on what they're good at and what they're not