About the Company Our client is building a B2B marketplace and trade operating system for a large global industry that still relies heavily on spreadsheets, phone calls, manual coordination, and fragmented workflows.
With strong founder-market fit, early revenue traction, a recent raise, and major enterprise interest, the company is entering a critical scale-up phase. The team is small, senior, highly pragmatic, and already using AI aggressively to accelerate product delivery.
About the Role This is a hands-on Lead Engineer role, reporting directly to the founder currently leading product and engineering.
You’ll guide technical direction, mentor a small NZ-based engineering team, and stay close to the code day-to-day.
The role is approximately 80% hands-on engineering and 20% leadership today, with scope to grow into a more senior technical leadership role as the company scales. You’ll work across Ruby on Rails, SQL, React Native, TypeScript, Railway, AWS, Linear, Figma, and Claude-powered development workflows.
Skills & Experience - Senior engineering experience in B2B SaaS, marketplace, or complex product environments
- Strong backend engineering capability, ideally with Ruby on Rails or equivalent production-scale experience
- Experience leading, mentoring, or managing engineers in a player-coach capacity
- Daily, serious use of AI engineering tools such as Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar
- Strong product judgement, bias toward shipping, and comfort operating in ambiguity
- NZ-based, with strong NZ timezone availability
- Experience with early-stage startups, vertical SaaS
Why Work Here? - Generous salary and ESOP
- Fully remote Work from Home role from anywhere in New Zealand
- Opportunity to co-architect a platform for a vast, under-served global market
- Direct access to highly credible founders with deep domain, commercial, and product experience
- Small, senior team where your technical decisions will materially shape the company
- Real pathway toward CTO as the engineering team scales
This opportunity is ideal for a high-agency builder who wants ownership, pace, ambiguity, and the chance to help define a category. For a confidential discussion, contact dan@talent.army.
