Season 1 · Episode 22
Unifying SEEK’s Tech Stack (Part 2): Time, Trade-offs & CTO Truths (with James Ross)
How do you merge three tech companies, run 500-step cutovers and ship to 430M+ people – and still sleep at night? In Part 2 of our Unification deep dive, SEEK CTO James Ross joins Raf, Seamus and Elliott Millar to unpack the hardest decisions, the pressure on teams, and what he’d never do again.
SEEK Bytes · SEEK
May 7, 202439m 37s
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Show Notes
What does it feel like to help run a three-year, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars unification project that merges three tech companies, dozens of systems and thousands of people – and then still keep the job boards running every day? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, CTO James Ross returns to share the unfiltered story of SEEK’s APAC unification, why he compares it to a “house renovation you love but never want to do again”, and what engineers can learn from it about scope, time and careers.
This episode's special guest: James Ross (SEEK CTO)
In this episode, we explore:
• How SEEK pulled off unification without burning everything down – migrating three companies’ worth of platforms, mobile apps, finance systems, CRM and collaboration tools, running 40-hour cutover weekends with 300–500-step runbooks, and using huge manual UAT “rocket gantries” to make sure it all worked exactly once.
• How to “dance inside the triangle” of time, cost and scope – why unification optimised ruthlessly for time, how product managers managed relentless scope trade-offs (including things like annual vs monthly salaries across markets), and why context-driven decisions beat one-size-fits-all best practices.
• Real talk on moving from engineer to CTO – James’ journey from clean-code-obsessed programmer to CTO, why most engineers would hate his job, how feedback loops shrink from “red-green-refactor” speed to “psychiatry-level” slowness in management, and how to know if you’re better suited to the leadership track or deep IC/lead engineer path.
If you’re in software, data, infrastructure, SRE, product, support or IT leadership and you loved Part 1 – or you just want the unfiltered truth about huge platform migrations, trade-offs and tech careers at the top – this Part 2 is packed with hard-won lessons you can apply in your own org.
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