Head of Engineering | Scale-up
Salary: $160,000 – $180,000 per year
Our Mission 🚲
We help around 2,000 New Zealand employers offer bikes and e-bikes as a free, streamlined employee benefit. This makes the daily commute healthier, more affordable, and far more sustainable. Employees at participating organisations can save between 32% and 63% on their dream ride through our free, pre-tax benefit programme.
The Role:
Workride is now entering its scale-up phase, with new product and service lines on the way, and the platform needs an owner. We’re looking for a hands-on Head of Engineering to join our Christchurch team, take the platform from founder-built to team-built, and establish the foundations that will carry Workride into its next stage of growth.
This is a doing role before it is a planning role. You will own engineering at Workride, working in close collaboration with the founders: they hold product direction and commercial priorities; you own how technology gets designed, built and shipped. The majority of your week will be spent designing and building alongside the team, and that stays true as the team grows around you.
Workride has grown on low-code and no-code tooling, which enabled rapid development and iteration as we built the functionality our customers required. It runs a real business every day, and it now needs to be progressively rebuilt. You will own the staged migration to Workride’s future operating environment while ensuring continued uptime for a business that trades every day of the week.
The Head of Engineering role offers a ground-floor seat in a rapidly growing company. You will have the opportunity to define our engineering frameworks, build the team, and work alongside the wider Workride team as we deliver new products and services that ultimately get more people on bikes. If your instinct is to open the editor and build rather than open a slide deck and plan, you will fit right in.
What You'll Be Doing?
Hands-On Engineering
Spend the majority of your week designing, building, and shipping code personally. staying deeply grounded in technical execution rather than managing from afar.
Rebuild engineering practices from the ground up, establishing sprint cadences, estimation standards, and deployment pipelines that make releases calm and predictable.
Improve quality and uptime targets (99%+), setting the standard for bug triage, incident response, and performance under load.
Grow the engineering team and establish the foundational frameworks, patterns, and culture that future engineers will inherit.
Rebuild & Scale Workride Plus
Workride Plus is our most recent programme, a financed offering that puts a real financing operation inside Workride. Our low-code and no-code stack got us to market leadership; it will not get us through the next decade. You will progressively rebuild it, while the business keeps trading.
Rearchitect our core transaction engines to support high-throughput payment flows, real-time ledgers, and complex state changes across the product lifecycle.
Overhaul reporting and data pipelines from the ground up to deliver audit-grade operational, compliance, and financial data straight from system sources.
Improve onboarding workflows by integrating modern verification, identity, and compliance controls—paving the way for friction-free expansion into new market segments.
Rebuild the end-to-end asset lifecycle platform, moving operational edge cases into our core operating system with robust, automated workflows.
Modernize the Platform
You will take ownership of the tech stack roadmap, making key architectural calls on what to refactor, what to decouple, and how to scale system capacity multi-fold.
Lead zero-downtime component migrations, systematically rebuilding parts of the stack while our live, daily trading operations keep running smoothly.
Improve platform resiliency from the ground up, elevating security posture, access controls, backups, and disaster recovery.
What You Bring to the Team
The Essentials:
You have 8+ years building production software, including senior or lead ownership of systems in the finance space: payments, billing, receivables, lending, or adjacent.
You have written production code recently and you want to keep writing it.
You have moved a live system to a new stack or architecture in stages, without material downtime.
You have been the first engineering leader, or led a small team, and the standards you set outlasted you.
You are comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room, making calls with imperfect information and owning them.
You are Christchurch based or committed to relocating, with full right to work in NZ. This is an in-person role at our CBD office, working alongside the team and the founders each day; it is not a remote position.
Bonus Points for:
Regulated environment exposure: consumer credit, KYC and AML, or privacy.
Accounting or ledger integration experience (Xero or similar).
Experience directing external contractors alongside an internal team.
A genuine interest in cycling, sustainability, health, or workplace wellness!
What Success Looks Like in Your First 12 Months
Complete Technical Ownership: Full ownership of the platform has seamlessly transitioned to engineering without customer disruption, with access, workflows, and observability fully established within the team.
Core Engine Overhaul: The core transactional platform and ledger engines have been rebuilt from the ground up on the future-state stack, delivering high reliability and scale.
Automated Workflows in Production: Onboarding, verification, and core billing engine pipelines are live and operational, supporting high-volume growth across key customer segments.
Modular Architecture & Migration: A phased zero-downtime migration is actively underway with initial components live, proving the platform is modular enough for new offerings to be configured rather than rebuilt.
Scalable Engineering Foundations: Engineering standards, environments, CI/CD pipelines, and documentation have been established from the ground up, allowing new engineers to onboard quickly and enabling the team to scale smoothly beyond you.
Why You'll Love It Here
Real Ownership: A rare mandate, full ownership of engineering and a re-platform, with a profitable, fast-growing business behind it.
Awesome Culture: A supportive, high-performing Christchurch team culture with great work life balance.
The Ultimate Perk?!: Full access to Workride's employee bike benefit scheme so you can get your dream bike or e-bike! 🚲