Engineering Team Lead — AI-Driven, Remote & Impactful

Optimal; Auckland; On-site; NZD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary reflective of experience and価ue

ESOP (Employee Share Option Plan)

Wellbeing allowance

Home office setup support

4 weeks annual leave + birthday

Job summary

Optimal seeks an Engineering Team Lead to join a small, ambitious team building data-driven research tools. You will lead engineering efforts while staying hands-on, shaping architecture, and guiding a high-performing team. The CTPO partners with you to define strategy and roadmap, and you’ll explore AI-driven improvements to accelerate delivery.

The role blends hands-on coding, technical leadership, and people management, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and impact across the product.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams and delivering software products.
• Ability to define strategy, roadmap, and architecture.
• Strong collaboration with product, design, and CTPO.
• Proven track record of delivering high-quality systems.
• Comfort with AI-enabled development practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead a small team of engineers and guide their growth.
• Contribute hands-on to architecture and codebase.
• Shape engineering strategy, architecture, and platform foundations.
• Collaborate with Product and Design to plan and ship features.
• Improve developer productivity with AI tooling and processes.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and incident response across services.

Skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

People management experience

Product mindset

Get things done

Excited about AI

Comfortable with ambiguity

React

Ruby on Rails

AWS

IaC

CI/CD

Tools

React

Ruby on Rails

AWS

IaC

CI/CD

Job description

Optimal seeks an Engineering Team Lead to join a small, ambitious team building data-driven research tools. You will lead engineering efforts while staying hands-on, shaping architecture, and guiding a high-performing team. The CTPO partners with you to define strategy and roadmap, and you’ll explore AI-driven improvements to accelerate delivery.

The role blends hands-on coding, technical leadership, and people management, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and impact across the product.