Engineering Team Lead – Remote ANZ, AI‑Driven Impact

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

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.