Dovetail is the Customer Intelligence Platform for the entire organization. We unify fragmented feedback from every touchpoint, including sales calls, support tickets, and research, into a single AI-powered intelligence layer that empowers every team to build, sell, and serve with confidence. Founded in 2017, we are a team of 100+ across our offices in Sydney and San Francisco, working with thousands of teams from Fortune 500 companies to the world’s most innovative startups.

The best never guess. We help teams turn the noise of thousands of customer interactions into the signal required to move faster, prioritize better, and drive revenue.

The role

You'll be building the data backbone of a Customer Intelligence Platform. Our mission is simple to state and hard to execute: make Dovetail the obvious home for all customer feedback data, by removing barriers to ingestion and increasing the value of data the moment it lands.

As Tech Lead Manager on our backend data platform team, you’ll lead that work technically and lead the people doing it, setting direction on distributed systems projects, coaching talented backend engineers, and keeping the team unblocked day to day. You'll be working on video processing at scale, transcription, and the core infrastructure that turns raw customer data into clear, actionable insights.

This is an in-person-first role, where you'll be working four days from our Surry Hills HQ. This is an excellent opportunity for a Senior Software Engineer with technical leadership experience, offering a credible step toward an Engineering Manager role.

What you'll do

• Coach and develop talented backend engineers. You'll do this through code review, pairing, and design discussions that raise the technical bar for the team.

• Run the team’s core rituals, including standups and sprint planning, and do the day-to-day work of keeping the team unblocked.

• Build reliable customer data integrations. Design and maintain the systems that continuously sync customer data from tools like Gong, Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, HubSpot, and more into Dovetail. You'll build reliable, scalable integrations with robust authentication, rate limiting, error handling, and monitoring.

• Build our core data platform. Develop the shared data pipeline that transforms raw customer data into clean, enriched datasets used across Dovetail. You'll help create a scalable foundation that powers features and future AI capabilities.

• Create reusable data infrastructure. Build systems that allow customer data to be ingested once and reused across multiple teams and products, reducing duplicate processing and making our platform faster, more efficient, and easier to scale.

• Develop data enrichment services. Build pipelines that automatically transcribe conversations, redact sensitive information, link customer records, and extract structured insights so every product surface works from the same high-quality data.

• Scale distributed backend systems. Design event-driven architectures that process millions of customer records efficiently. You'll improve system reliability, optimise processing pipelines, and build the monitoring and observability tools that help the team quickly detect and resolve issues.

What you'll bring

• Deep engineering technical expertise, operating at a senior level with 1-2 years’ experience as a tech lead or team lead, with direct exposure to engineering at scale.

• Deep backend and data processing experience, including systems that need to perform at scale. Exposure to media or data-in-motion pipelines, such as video processing or transcription, is a strong plus.

• A passion for innovation and learning. We’re an AI native business, and we expect you to already be embedding AI into your day-to-day work: knowing when to leverage it, how to direct it effectively, and how to apply it to improve the quality, speed, and impact of what you ship.

• You are pragmatic and flexible. Like your new teammates, you’re used to doing what’s necessary to get the job done. You’ll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, be resourceful to solve problems, and be able to adjust to shifting deadlines and project goals.

• When you do it, you nail it. You share our keen eye for quality. You don’t half-ass your work; what you ship is top-notch, and you cut scope before you cut quality.

• Excellent, concise communicator. You can easily convey your thoughts, opinions, and feelings with your team, and you’re able to articulate effort versus impact trade-offs.

Why you'll love it here

We hire smart people and look after them well! Here's the deal:

📈 Equity for everyone. Competitive base salary plus options, so every builder is aligned on long-term impact.

🏢 A place to do your best work, wherever you are. Our Sydney office is built for in-person first collaboration. Our US team runs on a flexible remote setup. Either way, you've got what you need.

🤝 Built in connection. Join a Doveclub, bond with your team regularly, and celebrate the small wins, big milestones, and cultural moments with the whole company.

📚 Learn and thrive. Flexible L&D and wellness benefits, choose between a generous $3000 L&D allowance, or up to $1000 on wellness.

🌴 Time to recharge. Four weeks of accrued leave, floating public holidays, and gifted bonus Kit Kat days sprinkled throughout the year.

🌍 Four weeks from anywhere. Up to four weeks a year doing your job from anywhere in the world. Split it up or use it all at once.

🍼 Generous parental leave. We offer 20 weeks for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers, plus return-to-work support.

🎉 Four weeks at four years. Four years is a long time in tech, and we value loyalty. Take an additional four weeks off to reset and recharge.

🩺 Stellar US benefits. Comprehensive health, dental, vision, 401(k), and more through Sequoia.

At Dovetail, we're building a place where every team member feels supported and valued. We celebrate individualism and want you to show up as your authentic self every day. It’s no secret that diversity builds the best teams, large or small, so we highly encourage applications from people who identify as part of an underrepresented group.

On AI: We expect candidates to already be embedding AI into their day-to-day work. We look for people who are thoughtful and pragmatic in how they use AI—knowing when to leverage it, how to direct it effectively, and how to apply it to improve the quality, speed, and impact of their work.