This is a genuine technical leadership role rather than a move away from engineering. You’ll be the senior technical member of a squad, taking ownership of solution design, architecture and engineering quality, while remaining close to the code and rolling your sleeves up when needed.
About the role
The role provides technical oversight across a squad of 4–6 engineers, with a strong focus on coaching and growing the capability of others.
You’ll work closely with the Product Owner, helping shape technical approaches, assessing feasibility, effort and risk, and making sure what the team builds is scalable, secure, maintainable and production-ready.
There’s also a strong focus on AI-assisted software development, so we’re looking for someone who is already comfortable using modern AI coding tools and understands how to get the productivity benefits without compromising engineering quality. What you’ll be doing
About you
You'll be someone who can set the technical direction and then help the team deliver it. You can personally design, build and ship production code while maintaining architectural standards and coaching the wider team.
You are an experienced senior engineer who has naturally progressed into a technical leadership role, but still enjoys being hands-on. You’ll bring:
**Please note only applicants currently based in New Zealand with the appropriate work rights (a valid visa) will be considered.
There’s also a strong focus on AI-assisted software development, so we’re looking for someone who is already comfortable using modern AI coding tools and understands how to get the productivity benefits without compromising engineering quality. What you’ll be doing
- Owning solution architecture and technical design across the squad.
- Making key decisions around technical approaches, patterns and tooling.
- Remaining hands-on with the design, development and delivery of production software.
- Setting engineering standards and ensuring strong practices around code quality, testing, security and documentation.
- Leading code reviews, technical discussions and complex problem-solving.
- Providing technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to intermediate and junior engineers.
- Working closely with the Product Owner to provide advice around technical feasibility, effort, risk and trade-offs.
- Using and guiding the effective use of AI coding assistants and agents across the development lifecycle.
- Leading debugging and root-cause analysis across complex application and production issues.
- Ensuring solutions are secure, observable, supportable and ready for production.
About you
You'll be someone who can set the technical direction and then help the team deliver it. You can personally design, build and ship production code while maintaining architectural standards and coaching the wider team.
You are an experienced senior engineer who has naturally progressed into a technical leadership role, but still enjoys being hands-on. You’ll bring:
- 5+ years’ software engineering experience, including delivering production systems end-to-end.
- Strong software architecture and solution design capability.
- Experience operating as a Tech Lead, Lead Engineer or senior technical authority within a development team, setting engineering standards and leading code reviews.
- Strong hands-on development capability across modern languages and frameworks, as well as practical experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot, including reviewing and validating AI-generated code rather than simply consuming it.
- Strong cloud experience across platforms such as AWS or Azure.
- Strong debugging, root-cause analysis and problem-solving skills.
- A security-by-design mindset and understanding of production-grade engineering.
- Experience mentoring and developing other engineers.
- The ability to communicate technical decisions, risks and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
**Please note only applicants currently based in New Zealand with the appropriate work rights (a valid visa) will be considered.
