Technical Team Lead

About Optimal

Optimal creates advanced research products that help teams make smarter, evidence-based decisions. The company is relied on by major global brands and focuses strongly on user experience and the value of understanding people.

Role overview

Optimal is hiring a Technical Team Lead who enjoys building strong products and enabling engineers to do their best work. This is a high-impact position in a small, ambitious team where you will influence how the product is built, delivered, and scaled, while working closely with other technical leaders and the CTPO on strategy and roadmap direction.

The role combines technical leadership, practical hands-on engineering, and people management. You will stay close to the code, help shape architecture and delivery, and lead a small engineering team.

Key responsibilities

• Work with the other technical leaders and the CTPO to define, refine, and advance engineering strategy, architecture, and platform foundations.
• Contribute directly to the codebase and help design and build dependable, scalable systems.
• Look for ways to use AI tools to improve developer productivity and speed up delivery.
• Manage a small team of engineers, support their growth, and foster a culture built on learning, accountability, and feedback.
• Remove blockers, reduce friction, and keep the team progressing toward its goals.
• Own reliability and day-to-day operability practices, including observability, incident response, on-call support, and building secure, resilient systems.

What we are looking for

• An entrepreneurial approach, with interest in the product, customer, and commercial outcomes beyond your immediate team.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers and contributing to technical decision-making.
• A product-focused mindset, with comfort working closely with product and design teams.
• A practical, action-oriented way of working, with the confidence to make decisions and keep momentum.
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI and its potential to improve software development.
• Comfort working through ambiguity and helping define the path forward from broad goals.
• Experience with the company’s stack or a comparable environment, including React, Ruby on Rails, AWS, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD tools.

What’s on offer

• A competitive salary aligned to experience and contribution.
• Eligibility to join the Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP).
• Annual wellbeing allowance and related support.
• Support for setting up your home office.
• Four weeks of annual leave, plus an extra day off on your birthday.
• Flexible, remote-first working, with the option to work from anywhere in New Zealand or Australia; the Wellington office is available for hybrid working if preferred.

Location and work arrangement

This role can be based in New Zealand or Australia and is remote by default, with hybrid work available from the Wellington office.

Additional information

This position is suited to someone who enjoys building, leading, improving systems, and introducing a bit of pace and experimentation into the way the team works.