Engineering Team Lead (ANZ, Remote)

Workshop; New Zealand; Hybrid; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP

Wellbeing allowance

Home office setup support

4 weeks annual leave + birthday

Job summary

Optimal is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to build and scale our product, partnering with CTPO and other technical leaders. You will shape engineering strategy, mentor a small team, and stay hands-on with the codebase while driving delivery with AI-enabled tooling.

In this role, you will own reliability, collaborate with Product and Design, and help the team move fast in a remote-first, NZ/Australia distributed environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading an engineering team and delivering software.
• Strong collaboration with product and design.
• Hands-on with modern web stack and cloud.
• Ability to shape architecture and strategy.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship: stay hands-on with the codebase and contribute to scalable systems.
• Shape how we build: define and evolve engineering strategy, architecture, and platform foundations.
• People management: mentor and develop engineers and foster a high-performance culture.
• Use AI to move faster: explore and implement AI tools to boost productivity.
• Own delivery: partner with Product and Design to plan and ship with confidence.
• Unblock and support the team: remove friction and help hit goals.
• Own reliability and operability: lead observability, incident response, on-call, and scalable systems.

Skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

People management

Product mindset

Bias for action

Comfortable with ambiguity

Collaboration with Product/Design

Tools

React

Ruby on Rails

AWS

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD

Terraform

Observability tooling

Job description

ANZ | Remote (or Hybrid from our Wellington office)

About Optimal

About the role

We’re looking for an Engineering Team Lead to join our team - someone who loves building great products and helping other engineers do their best work.

At Optimal, we build tools that help teams make better decisions through user research. We’re a small, ambitious team, which means you’ll have a real impact on how we build, ship, and scale our product. You’ll play a key role in shaping the strategy and roadmap - partnering closely with other technical leaders and our CTPO.

What you’ll do:

• Build and ship: Stay hands‑on with the codebase, contributing to the design and development of scalable, reliable systems
• Shape how we build: Partner with other technical leaders and the CTPO to define and evolve our engineering strategy, architecture, and platform foundations
• People management: Manage a small team of engineers, support their development, and create a high performance culture of learning, ownership, and feedback
  
• Use AI to move faster: Explore and implement ways to leverage AI tools to improve developer productivity and accelerate delivery
• Own delivery: Partner closely with Product and Design to break down problems, plan effectively, and ship with confidence
• Unblock and support the team: Keep things moving, remove friction, and help the team hit their goals
• Own reliability and operability: Lead site reliability practices across the team - including observability, incident response, on‑call, and building systems that are scalable, secure, and resilient

What we’re looking for:

• Entrepreneurial mindset: You think beyond your team - you care about the product, the customer, and the business, and you’re motivated to make an impact
• People management experience: Proven ability to mentor or manage engineers while maintaining individual contributions
• Product mindset: You care about outcomes, not just output - and enjoy working closely with product and design
• Get things done: You bring energy, momentum, and a bias for action. You’re pragmatic and not afraid to make decisions and move forward
• Excited about AI: You’re excited about how AI can improve the way we build software and are keen to experiment and apply it in practice
• Comfortable with ambiguity: You can work with high‑level goals and help shape the path forward
• Experience with our stack (or similar): React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD technologies

What’s in it for you:

• Competitive salary (we offer a salary that reflects your experience and the value you’ll bring to our team)
• An opportunity to join our Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) to help you benefit from the long‑term success of the company
• Annual wellbeing allowance and support
• Home office set‑up support
• 4 weeks annual leave plus an additional day off on your birthday
• Flexible and remote first working (our HQ is based in Wellington, NZ, but this role can be based anywhere in New Zealand or Australia)
  

If you’re someone who enjoys building, leading, and improving how things get done - and you like the idea of bringing a bit of pace and experimentation into the team - we’d love to hear from you.