Engineering Team Lead

About Optimal

Optimal develops advanced research tools designed to empower teams to make data-driven decisions. Our solutions are trusted by leading global brands and we prioritize user experience and leveraging human insights to transform decision-making.

Role Overview

We are seeking an Engineering Team Lead who is passionate about crafting exceptional products and fostering an environment where engineers excel. This position offers a combination of hands-on software development, technical vision, and leadership of a small engineering team. The role involves close collaboration with product and design teams and significant influence over our product strategy and engineering roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain active involvement in coding to design and develop scalable and dependable systems.
• Collaborate with other technical leaders and the Chief Technology and Product Officer to shape our engineering approach, architecture, and platform groundwork.
• Manage and support a small engineer team by cultivating a culture of learning, ownership, and constructive feedback.
• Investigate and apply AI tools to enhance developer efficiency and speed up delivery.
• Work closely with product and design teams to decompose challenges, organize plans, and ensure confident product releases.
• Remove obstacles and provide team support to achieve objectives swiftly.
• Lead site reliability engineering practices such as monitoring, incident management, on-call duties, and building scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant systems.

Candidate Profile

• Entrepreneurial perspective with concern for the product, user satisfaction, and business impact.
• Demonstrated experience managing or mentoring engineers while contributing technically.
• Product-focused mindset prioritizing outcomes and collaboration with product and design counterparts.
• Proactive and decisive, capable of maintaining momentum and action-oriented progress.
• Keen interest in exploring AI to transform software development processes and willing to experiment with its application.
• Adept at navigating uncertainty and high-level goals to create actionable plans.
• Experience with React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous integration/delivery systems or comparable technologies.

Benefits Package

• Competitive salary reflective of your experience and impact.
• Participation in the Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) to share in company success.
• Annual wellness allowance and related support.
• Support for home office setup.
• Four weeks paid annual leave plus a birthday holiday.
• Flexible, remote-first work environment based anywhere in New Zealand or Australia, with optional hybrid attendance in Wellington.