Engineering Leader · Melbourne
I lead engineering teams that ship things that matter — with clarity, care, and a healthy intolerance for unnecessary complexity.
Background
I came to software engineering through teaching. For over a decade I worked as a Senior Teacher, Head of English, and Coordinator of Learning Technologies across schools in the UK and Australia. That background isn't a footnote — it's the lens through which I lead.
When I made the transition into tech, I had to learn fast, prove myself quickly, and earn credibility in rooms where I was the least experienced person. I know what that feels like, and it shapes how I support and develop the people on my teams.
Since then I've worked as a consultant at a machine learning company, led engineering at a social-impact startup through rapid growth, serving as its CTO, and now I'm an Engineering Manager at Atomi — an Australian EdTech platform used by high school students and teachers across the country. The contexts have varied. The approach hasn't changed much.
"The best engineering managers I've met thought like teachers — always asking: does this person understand? Can I help them get there?"
I was also a long-time, early contributor to freeCodeCamp, the open source learning platform, where I've written, moderated, and helped mentor thousands of people learning to code.
Leadership Philosophy
Understanding what someone actually needs — as opposed to what they're saying — is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do. That applies to engineers on my team, stakeholders pushing back on timelines, and users who can't articulate why the product frustrates them. I take it seriously.
But empathy without accountability is just avoidance wearing a friendly face. When someone isn't performing, I have the conversation early and directly. I'd rather have an uncomfortable discussion now than a damaging one later — for them and for the team. I've learned from the mistake of not doing this in the past.
I'm not a product manager, and I'm not trying to be. But an EM who treats delivery as the only success metric is trying to ride a bike using only one pedal. The question isn't just "did we ship it?" — it's "did we ship the right thing, and are we paying attention to whether it's working?"
I push my teams to have opinions about what they're building. I think that makes the engineering better, the product conversations more honest, and the roadmap decisions more grounded.
Perfect is the enemy of shipped, but so is shipped-too-fast. I've seen teams grind to a halt under technical debt they never addressed, and I've seen other teams gold-plate code that got deleted six months later. Neither is obviously better.
The job is to make considered trade-offs, document them honestly, and revisit them. I'm not dogmatic about process or tooling. I'm dogmatic about being deliberate.
It shows up in how you run a retrospective when the sprint went badly. In whether people feel safe flagging a problem before it becomes a crisis. In whether feedback flows in all directions or only downward.
I think about this stuff consciously, not as a box-ticking exercise. The teams I'm proudest of have been ones where people genuinely looked out for each other — and that doesn't happen by accident.
Experience
Engineering Manager
Atomi
Engineering Manager for a squad of five engineers spanning the Authoring and Learning Experience domains at an EdTech platform serving high school students and teachers across Australia. The work I'm most proud of here is cultural rather than technical — shifting the team toward genuine ownership of their domains, building the kind of trust with our PM and designer that makes scoping conversations crisp rather than fraught, and raising the product fluency of engineers who now have real opinions about what they're building. The result is a team that moves quickly without cutting corners, and collaborates well enough that that pace is sustainable.
Lead Engineer -> Chief Technical Officer
Grace Papers
Joined as the first in-house engineer, inheriting a functional but fragile agency-built platform with no tests, difficult maintenance, and a company full of manual processes that the product barely supported. Over three years I turned that proof-of-concept into a stable, maintainable production system — building out automated testing, fixing the foundations, and streamlining internal workflows that had been held together with goodwill and spreadsheets.
I also grew the technical team to five, hiring two juniors, a senior engineer, and a data scientist. By the time I was appointed CTO, I was accountable for technical strategy and platform architecture while working closely with a product agency to envision a new suite of coaching tools.
Software Engineer · Consultant
Silverpond
Built web applications supporting machine learning work across industries including large-scale asset inspection, wildlife conservation, and retail. Fast context-switching, diverse stakeholders, and the kind of problems that don't have obvious answers. I quickly learned the value of talking to customers and listening carefully to what they needed to build excellent products.
Contributor · Moderator · Writer
freeCodeCamp
A sustained, voluntary investment in a community I care about. Writing articles, moderating forums, and helping people navigate the intimidating early stages of learning to code. I didn't do it for the swag, but the freeCodeCamp Top Contributor backpack Quincy sent me is still one of my treasured posessions!
Senior Teacher · Head of English · Coordinator, Learning Technologies
Various Schools, UK & Australia
Over a decade in secondary education shaped how I communicate, how I mentor, and how I think about people learning difficult things under pressure. I reference this career more often than you'd expect, and I think that's a feature.
Writing
Podcast
The freeCodeCamp podcast — on career change, open source, and what teaching gave me that a bootcamp couldn't.
Podcast
A panel conversation on hiring and retention — particularly the challenges that are specific to small, fast-moving teams.
Leadership
A framework for thinking about the different types of feedback — and why a diet of only one kind leaves people malnourished.
Craft
The parallels between physical endurance and the patience required to actually get good at something.
More at blog.jacksonbates.com.
Get in touch
If you're thinking about a senior engineering leadership role and want to have a conversation, I'm open to it.
linkedin.com/in/jackson-bates