Engineering Team Lead

About Optimal

Optimal creates advanced research tools designed to support teams in making data-informed decisions. Recognized globally by leading brands, the company values excellent user experiences and the significant impact of human insights.

Role Overview

We are seeking an Engineering Team Lead who is passionate about developing outstanding products and fostering a supportive environment for engineers to excel. As a core member of a compact and driven team, you will significantly influence the development, deployment, and scaling of our product. Your responsibilities include technical and people leadership, participating closely in coding, architecture decisions, and leading a focused engineering group.

Key Responsibilities

• Remain actively involved in coding while designing and developing robust, scalable systems.
• Collaborate with technical leaders and the Chief Technology and Product Officer to guide engineering strategy, system architecture, and foundational platforms.
• Lead and mentor a small team of engineers, fostering a culture of growth, ownership, and constructive feedback.
• Investigate and integrate AI technologies to enhance developer productivity and speed delivery.
• Work closely with Product and Design teams to deconstruct challenges, execute effective planning, and deliver confidently.
• Keep the team unblocked and on track by eliminating obstacles and facilitating goal achievement.
• Oversee reliability and operational excellence, managing observability, incident handling, on-call processes, and ensuring system scalability, security, and resilience.

Desired Qualifications and Traits

• Entrepreneurial approach with a broad perspective on product, customer, and business impact.
• Demonstrated experience managing or mentoring engineers while continuing individual technical contributions.
• Product-oriented mindset focusing on outcomes rather than mere outputs, with strong collaboration alongside product and design teams.
• High energy with a proactive attitude, practical decision-making skills, and momentum to drive results.
• Interest and enthusiasm for applying AI innovations to software development workflows.
• Ability to navigate uncertain or high-level goals and define actionable strategies.
• Familiarity with our technology stack or equivalents, including React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD methodologies.

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive remuneration aligned with experience and team value contribution.
• Participation opportunity in the Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) for long-term company success benefits.
• Annual wellness allowance and support initiatives.
• Assistance with home office setup.
• Four weeks of paid annual leave plus an additional day off on your birthday.
• Flexible remote-first work environment, with HQ located in Wellington, New Zealand; role available anywhere in New Zealand or Australia.