[Hiring] Engineering Team Lead @Optimal Workshop

Role Description

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.

This role is a mix of hands-on engineering, technical leadership, and people leadership. You’ll be close to the code, shaping architecture and delivery, while leading a small team of Engineers.

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Benefits

• 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).