Engineering Team Lead — Remote (ANZ)

Optimal; Christchurch; On-site; NZD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP program

Wellbeing allowance

Home office setup support

4 weeks annual leave + birthday

Remote-first with NZ/AU flexibility

Job summary

Optimal is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to drive hands-on engineering, technical leadership, and people management. You’ll shape architecture and delivery while leading a small team of engineers, partnering with CTPO and product/design to deliver impact.

Remote-first role with potential hybrid from Wellington, NZ HQ, offering ESOP, wellbeing allowance, home office setup, and generous leave. Flexible across NZ or Australia.

Qualifications

• Entrepreneurial mindset with a focus on product, customer, and business impact.
• Experience mentoring or managing engineers while preserving individual contributions.
• Product-minded and results-oriented, collaborating with product and design.
• Decisive, pragmatic, and capable of moving forward in ambiguous situations.
• Excited about applying AI to improve software development.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship: Stay hands-on with the codebase, contributing to scalable, reliable systems.
• Shape how we build: Define engineering strategy, architecture, and platform foundations.
• People management: Manage a small team of engineers, support development, foster learning.
• Use AI to move faster: Leverage AI tools to improve developer productivity and delivery.
• Own delivery: Collaborate with Product and Design to plan and ship with confidence.
• Unblock and support the team: Remove friction and help the team hit goals.
• Own reliability and operability: Lead observability, incident response, on-call, and resilience.

Skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

People management

Product mindset

Get things done

AI enthusiasm

Ambiguity tolerance

Stack familiarity

Tools

React

Ruby on Rails

AWS

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Job description

Optimal is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to drive hands-on engineering, technical leadership, and people management. You’ll shape architecture and delivery while leading a small team of engineers, partnering with CTPO and product/design to deliver impact.

Remote-first role with potential hybrid from Wellington, NZ HQ, offering ESOP, wellbeing allowance, home office setup, and generous leave. Flexible across NZ or Australia.