Engineering Team Lead

About Optimal

Optimal creates powerful research tools that enable teams to make decisions backed by data. Trusted by major global brands, the company prioritizes excellent user experience and values insightful human research.

Role Overview

We are seeking an Engineering Team Lead passionate about building exceptional products and empowering engineers to deliver their best. As a pivotal team member, you will influence product strategy and development alongside other technical leaders and the Chief Technology and Product Officer (CTPO). This hybrid role blends hands-on engineering with technical and people leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Continue contributing directly to code by designing and developing scalable, reliable systems.
• Collaborate with technical leadership and the CTPO to refine engineering strategies, architecture, and platform principles.
• Lead, mentor, and manage a small engineering team fostering a culture of learning, ownership, and feedback.
• Investigate and integrate AI tools to enhance developer efficiency and speed up delivery.
• Work closely with Product and Design teams to decompose problems, plan, and confidently ship solutions.
• Remove obstacles and support your team in achieving goals effectively.
• Oversee site reliability practices, including monitoring, incident response, on-call rotations, and building secure, resilient systems.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Entrepreneurial outlook, prioritizing product, customer, and business impact beyond the engineering team.
• Demonstrated experience managing or mentoring engineers while maintaining active technical contributions.
• Strong product orientation focusing on outcomes over outputs and collaborative work with Product and Design.
• Proactive and pragmatic, driven to deliver results with decisiveness and momentum.
• Excited about leveraging AI to transform software development and eager to experiment with new technologies.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity with a capacity to work from high-level goals to define actionable plans.
• Experience with React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD pipelines or comparable technologies.

Benefits

• Competitive salary reflecting your experience and the value you bring.
• Opportunity to participate in the Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) to share in company growth.
• Annual wellbeing allowance along with supportive benefits.
• Support for home office setup.
• Four weeks of annual leave plus a birthday day off.
• Flexible, remote-first work culture with option to work from anywhere in New Zealand or Australia; company headquarters located in Wellington, New Zealand.