Hiring and AI Adoption in Engineering Teams
Across Australia and New Zealand, engineering leaders are describing a similar experience. Hiring feels heavier than it did a few years ago. There are more applicants, more tools involved in assessment, and more surface-level polish in submissions. Yet confidence at the end of the process is often lower.
AI has not changed the core objective of hiring. As Paul Keen, VP Engineering at Culture Amp, explains, the goal of an interview remains consistent: to understand how someone thinks, how they approach problems, and how they work within a team.
The Practitioners Behind This Guide
Paul Keen
VP Engineering, Culture Amp
Culture Amp is one of Australia’s most recognised scaleups, operating at global scale with mature engineering processes and structured hiring systems. As VP Engineering, Paul oversees large teams and invests heavily in interview design, signal calibration, and leadership capability.
Paul’s view is pragmatic. The fundamentals of interviewing have not changed. Companies still capability. What has changed is the environment engineers work in.
Tracy Bongiorno
CTO, Mentorloop | Community Organiser, Tech Leading Ladies
Mentorloop operates as a growing technology with Tracy personally leading hiring. She has built intuitive, elegant SaaS products that improve how people live and work, guiding early-stage platforms into mature enterprise services.
Tracy’s experience spans Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, AWS, REST APIs, and modern PaaS architectures. Her leadership style is pragmatic, collaborative, and grounded in improving processes and empowering teams.
Jordan Yeomans
Chief Technical Officer at MEQ Probe
At MEQ Probe, Jordan Yeomans leads a team building novel hardware and software powered by machine learning. His work centres on high-level technical strategy and rapidly delivering proof-of-concept and MVP solutions that unlock business value from emerging technologies.
In hiring, Jordan deliberately embraces AI rather than trying to restrict it. Jordan’s central position is that AI will continue to abstract software
