Engineering Team Lead

About Optimal

Optimal creates advanced research tools designed to empower teams in making data-driven decisions. Renowned and trusted by major global brands, the company focuses on exceptional user experience and the impactful role of human insight.

Role Overview

We are seeking an Engineering Team Lead who is passionate about building excellent products and enabling engineers to excel. As part of a small but dynamic team, your contributions will significantly influence product development, strategy, and scaling efforts.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain direct involvement in coding by designing and developing scalable and dependable systems.
• Collaborate with other technical leaders and the Chief Technology Product Officer to steer engineering strategy, architecture, and core platform development.
• Lead and manage a small engineering team, fostering a high-performance culture emphasizing learning, ownership, and constructive feedback.
• Innovate by applying AI tools to boost developer productivity and speed up software delivery.
• Coordinate effectively with Product and Design teams to decompose challenges, plan accurately, and deliver confidently.
• Remove obstacles and provide support to ensure the team consistently meets its objectives.
• Oversee site reliability engineering including monitoring, incident management, on-call duties, and building systems that prioritize scalability, security, and resilience.

Candidate Profile

• Entrepreneurial mentality with a strong focus on product success, customer satisfaction, and business impact.
• Experienced in managing or mentoring engineers while contributing work individually.
• A product-driven mindset, valuing outcomes beyond mere output, with a collaborative approach involving product and design.
• Proactive and energetic with a bias towards action and pragmatic decision-making.
• Keen interest in leveraging AI technology to enhance software development processes.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, establishing clear paths from high-level goals.
• Experience working with technology stacks like React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous integration/deployment tools.

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive salary tailored to experience and value added.
• Participation opportunity in the Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) to share in the company's success.
• Annual allowance and support for wellbeing.
• Support to establish an effective home office setup.
• Four weeks of paid annual leave plus an extra day off for your birthday.
• Flexible working arrangements with a remote-first culture; headquarters in Wellington, NZ, with possibility to work across New Zealand or Australia.