Engineering Team Lead - Remote, AI-Driven Impact

Optimal; Wellington; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP

Wellbeing allowance

Home office set-up

4 weeks annual leave + birthday day

Flexible remote-first

Job summary

Optimal is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to guide a small, ambitious group of engineers. The role blends hands-on software development with people leadership, architecture shaping, and strategic alignment with product goals.

You’ll work closely with the CTPO to drive delivery, quality, and scalable systems. You’ll be at the intersection of product, engineering, and delivery, ensuring rapid iteration while maintaining reliability and strong engineering foundations.

Qualifications

• Leadership experience guiding engineers and shipping software
• Ability to balance hands-on coding with people leadership
• Strong product focus and collaboration with product/design teams
• Comfort making decisions and moving fast in a dynamic environment
• Interest in applying AI to improve developer productivity

Responsibilities

• Build and ship with the team, contributing to scalable systems
• Shape engineering strategy and architecture with CTPO
• Manage a small team of engineers and foster high performance
• Lead reliability practices, observability, and incident response
• Collaborate with Product and Design to plan and deliver

Skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

People management

Product mindset

Get things done

Excited about AI

Ambiguity tolerance

Experience with stack

Tools

React

Ruby on Rails

AWS

Infrastructure-as-code

CI/CD

Job description

Optimal is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to guide a small, ambitious group of engineers. The role blends hands-on software development with people leadership, architecture shaping, and strategic alignment with product goals.

You’ll work closely with the CTPO to drive delivery, quality, and scalable systems. You’ll be at the intersection of product, engineering, and delivery, ensuring rapid iteration while maintaining reliability and strong engineering foundations.