TECH TEAMS TUESDAY · A Building Tech Teams publication
01 · THE PATTERN
This week was the first week that I’ve had more conversations with teams and leaders about AI creating jobs rather than reducing them.
Thursday last week: a company leaning all the way in. A traditional organisation who has seen the opportunity for technology, automation and AI to rebuild their entire workflows and become “AI Native”, building a new core system from the ground up. They are looking to hire senior engineering professionals to help execute alongside an agency, and they expect to build out a team to maintain the system ongoing. It tied in nicely with the Curative CEO sharing on the 20VC podcast that they vibe coded their internal CRM, which let them move off an annual $600k Salesforce licence.
Monday this week: a conversation with a tech leader who, with their salary budgets and preference for regional talent, admits that finding experienced AI engineering talent comes with challenges. So they are hiring juniors for attitude and competency, on the expectation that people with curiosity and an eager attitude to problem solving will build the capacity from within. They are giving their teams tooling and pairing junior engineers with experienced ones to up skill.
The trend was also happening outside my conversations. Canberra stood up an Office of AI and framed the whole thing as a way to make jobs, not lose them. And two senior technology leaders spoke publicly about the changing nature of roles, and the upside for those merging skill sets.
My read from the recruitment seat is that we have yet to feel the same cuts companies globally did, possibly because we don’t have as many global tech / SaaS companies headquartered here, as they were some of the biggest culprits for mass redundancies. What is actually happening to teams is a reshape, not a cull. The shape of the team is being redrawn, roles are changing, and AI is being folded into existing roles. That is the thread through everything below.
02 · THE MOVES
1. Canberra just made AI a jobs program
Anthony Albanese used a speech at the University of Sydney to announce an Office of AI inside the Prime Minister’s department, and he framed it around work in the plainest terms he could: “We should not treat AI as a threat to good jobs, we must use it as an instrument to create them.” (Forbes Australia)
And for the designers, the writers, the creatives in my network, there was positive news around the protection and control of your work with no loosening of copyright laws.
There are obvious incentives to frame this in a positive way, and Australia’s decisions around data centres will have a big impact on future job and wealth creation.
If we read past the politics, this is a bet. The government has looked at the same evidence everyone else has and decided the story where AI reduces our workforce and kills the environment is not the one to sell to the public. It is the same shift I opened with. The conversations I am having have moved from cutting teams to building them, and the political statements are trending in the same direction.
For leaders: a national standard is coming by 2027, and beyond that I’d imagine there will be more legislation around the use of AI in organisations. We should be looking at international trends for expectations of what’s to come, personally I’ve been watching the EU’s approach to AI in recruitment over the past six months.
For tech professionals: if and when Australia commits to significant investment in data centres, there will be a scarcity of talent. The jobs created to build and maintain those data centres will be skill sets in real demand.
2. Builder-executives are getting paid like professional athletes
Nikhyl Singhal, who has run product at the likes of Google and Meta, wrote this week that a new kind of leader is commanding a new kind of money. The people who can both build and run, who sit close enough to the work to ship and high enough to own the outcome, are seeing offers that “look less like salary bands and more like pro-athlete contracts.” (The Skip )
This ties into the question I was asking Nathan Hill on last week’s episode of the Building Tech Teams podcast. If you were a principal engineer on two hundred thousand, and now you run a team of agents that does ten times the output, what are you worth. The market at the very top is starting to answer, and it is answering with numbers that most Australian companies aren’t willing to compete with.
Nikhyl said “the same profile commands two and three times what it did a year ago”, the profile being product builders who can work with modern tools and run an executive scope. I’ve spoken to many companies over the past year and I’ve not seen more than a handful of roles move their salaries north in that magnitude. Australia does not price talent the way Silicon Valley does, and the builder-executive is exactly the profile we’ll lose to international companies.
For leaders: the person who can build and run is your scarcest hire and your highest flight risk. If your salary bands cannot describe them, you will lose them to someone whose bands can.
For tech professionals: the premium is moving to the people who pair judgment with the ability to actually build. That is the rung to climb toward, it’s the folding in of new skills to existing roles.
3. Mosseri just described the new shape of a product team
Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, says the standard product team is going from a “baker’s dozen of specialists”, to a lean pod of four to six generalist engineers plus one new role he calls “product staff”: a single operator blending PM, design, data science and research. (Lenny’s Newsletter)
This has similarities to the roles Nikhyl talks about above, the blending of existing skillsets and new tooling. Adam described the usual candidate for this new “product staff” role as usually a Product Manager who can do some of what designers, data scientists, and researchers do, augmented by internal AI tools.
The part worth exploring is what that title does to a career path. For a decade the safe move was to go deeper into one specialism. Become the expert. This shape rewards the opposite, the generalist who can hold product, data and design at once and own more broadly. In Australia that runs the opposite of how most teams are built, and how roles are salaried. Our job architecture and salary bands are traditionally built for the specialist, not the generalist.
For leaders: the specialist-heavy team is being replaced by generalists who each carry more. You may need to be creative with job titles and salary bands for your best team members who are playing a broader role and bringing greater levels of value.
For tech professionals: the safe move is no longer deeper specialisation. It is becoming the operator who can carry product, data and design together. That role is being created right now, by the individuals, and the competition for it is thin.
03 · FROM THE INDEX
One read a week from the AI Jobs Index, the live tracker I run at aijobsindex.com.au. Data as of 19 July 2026.
Start with what the Index shows. AI is now named in a third of Australian technology job ads. The Diffusion Index, measuring AI references in tech jobs sits at 32.6 percent, 998 of 3,062 tech ads scanned in the trailing 30 days. Strip it back to genuine AI-specialist roles and it is 84 listings, only 2.7 percent.
The language of AI is everywhere in hiring, and AI is being folded into existing jobs far faster than it is creating brand-new AI ones. It’s the same trend of the conversations with Nikhyl and Adam, AI is not creating a significant amount of brand new roles, but there is an expectation of traditional roles to now have skills around AI.
04 · PEOPLE: BIG TECH EXECS ARE IN HOT DEMAND
The clearest signal in the market this week is not a layoff. It is who is being hired, and from where.
Start at home. AustralianSuper, the country’s largest super fund, has pulled Sarah Carney out of Microsoft to become its first-ever Head of AI and Automation. Carney spent a decade at Microsoft, most recently as National CTO for Australia and New Zealand, and she starts late this month. This is a big move, a major Australian institution created an AI leadership seat and filled it with a big-tech operator. (iTnews)
And it’s happening internationally as well. The big players in AI are attracting founders and executives out of everywhere. Tom Blomfield, who founded Monzo, has just joined Anthropic’s compute team. Anthropic has also picked up Andrej Karpathy, John Jumper out of DeepMind and Eric Boyd from Microsoft. Big companies investing significantly in top talent. (Sifted)
The trend is this: the very top of the technical market is being repriced and reshuffled at speed, and it does not stop at the tech companies. Moves like these set expectations that flow down to every Australian company trying to hire a senior AI leader this year, the talent is in demand, and you’ll be competing with big tech, consultancy and enterprise, both here and internationally.
05 · WHAT I’M BUILDING
I’m trying to become one of those builder-executives described above, partly because it will help our company NTP Talent, make my team’s roles more enjoyable, and partly because I’m a bit of a geek at heart.
There is a job title I have started seeing called a “talent engineer”: someone in talent acquisition or recruitment who has learned enough engineering to build. I am leaning into that skill set in my own work, building, testing before rolling it out for my team. Essentially I am designing automations and workflows around our current recruitment practices so we are not spending our days on highly repeatable tasks, and so the team’s time goes where it actually matters, having conversations with tech professionals and team leaders.
There is plenty of ordinary AI tech out there in recruitment at the moment and the process can get ugly if done poorly. At its worst it looks like companies using AI to write ads and job descriptions, candidates using AI to edit resumes targeted at AI ads, AI tools applying for 200 roles per day on autopilot, Applicant Tracking Systems using AI to judge AI-written resumes, and on and on. One day it will likely become an agent hiring an agent.
Here is one bit I want to be clear about, and I mean it for legal reasons and for moral ones. Recruitment is one of the most human-to-human roles there is, so it’s important that the human stays in the loop for the conversations with clients and with candidates, and for every hiring decision. The recruiter always makes the call on who is best for a role. The automation does the repeatable work. It does not decide who gets hired, and it never will.
I’m building for what the rest of this newsletter is describing, roles being rebuilt around AI rather than replaced by it.
06 · THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
This week I sat down with Claudia Barriga-Larriviere, People & Culture Director at Emergence Quantum, who has spent almost twenty years in people and culture across startups, scaleups and enterprises. We got into what actually holds a team together, and what happens when leaders try to automate that away. Her line that stuck with me: “Are they more productive, or are they just faster? I don’t know if it’s the same thing.”
My favourite parts of the conversation:
The one trait every strong team shares is not talent. It is being comfortable with discomfort. The teams that dodge the hard conversation pay for it later.
Hire for change, not for fit. Fit is a snapshot of who someone is today. Claudia wants the job description to ask who they are willing to become.
Every founding team needs a builder, an organiser and a learner. Miss one and you will feel it. It’s worth naming which one you are short.
Glue and grease. A quick test for whether your team needs more cohesion or more speed.
The AI question that matters is not speed. More output is not the same as more value if the human connection that good decisions rest on gets stripped out to get it.
Listen: Episode page · YouTube · Apple · Spotify
07 · THE ASK
If you’ve read the entire newsletter let me know. Plenty of late nights have gone into writing these weekly and feedback would be very much welcomed.
Cheers,
James
Tech Teams Tuesday is the weekly read from Building Tech Teams. Written by James MacDonald, MD of NTP Talent. The AI Jobs Index is a Building Tech Teams publication.