Lead Software Engineer

About the role

This is an engineering role first. You will spend roughly 80-90% of your time building, testing, reviewing and releasing software. You will also provide technical leadership across delivery, architecture, quality, security and production reliability. You will work alongside existing engineers, support architecture decisions and help establish a consistent way of working across the team. Priorities move as we learn from customers and the market. You need to be comfortable making good decisions with incomplete information and owning the result through to production.

What you will own

Build and ship

• Design, build, test and release production software across the Marketplace, Operating System and Workforce

• Own difficult or ambiguous work from problem definition through to live production behaviour.

• Work across frontend, backend, APIs, cloud services, databases, integrations and mobile where required.

• Investigate defects, performance problems, data discrepancies and production failures, then fix the underlying issue.

AI-native engineering

• Use Codex and other appropriate AI tools as a core development workflow, not an occasional assistant.

• Use AI to accelerate first-pass implementation, refactoring, testing, code review, investigation and documentation so more engineering time is spent on judgement and hard problems.

• Create repeatable specifications, prompts, review patterns and automated checks so AI-assisted output is consistent across the team.

• Lead other developers to become materially more productive with AI while retaining ownership and understanding of the code they ship.

• Keep up with new AI engineering methods and adopt them quickly when they improve speed, quality or cost.

Technical delivery and architecture

• Turn changing product priorities into clear technical stages, sequencing, estimates and trade-offs.

• Support architecture decisions across application, data and integrations; challenge weak approaches and document consequential decisions.

• Make delivery risk visible early. If priorities change, make the impact on scope, capacity or timing explicit.

• Provide constructive technical challenge to the Product Owner and leadership. Offer a viable path forward rather than simply saying no.

• Keep the team focused on agreed outcomes and prevent uncontrolled work from quietly displacing committed work.

Quality, releases and production

• Own the release process from engineering readiness through deployment and production verification.

• Set practical quality gates across automated tests, peer review, security checks and acceptance criteria.

• Increase meaningful unit, integration, regression, snapshot and browser-based coverage around the highest-risk workflows.

• Own observability for the live product: application errors, connector failures, stale data, failed background jobs, authentication or permission failures, performance degradation and failed releases.

• Ensure alerts are actionable, incidents are investigated and recurring failures result in stronger controls.

• Treat authentication, authorisation, tenant isolation, data privacy and secure configuration as core engineering requirements.

Team leadership

• Lead through technical credibility, pace, clear decisions and follow-through rather than meetings and process.

• Run useful code reviews and technical discussions, support developers when blocked and give direct feedback when output is below the expected standard.

• Create shared expectations for engineering pace, quality, ownership, communication and AI-assisted development.

• Mentor the intern and help the team become more capable without making every difficult decision dependent on you.

About you

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong recent full-stack delivery and evidence of meaningful software you personally shipped

• Strong TypeScript/JavaScript and modern web development experience, ideally React and Node.js, plus cloud/serverless, APIs, data modelling and third-party integrations

• Hands-on experience with automated testing, CI/CD, production monitoring and incident investigation

• Sound application-security knowledge including authentication, authorisation and multi-tenant data boundaries

• Experience influencing architecture and guiding other engineers while remaining a high-output individual contributor

• Demonstrated use of coding agents or AI-assisted engineering at substantial volume, with evidence that it materially improved output

• Comfort working in a startup where priorities change, requirements are incomplete and ownership matters more than job boundaries

• The confidence to challenge product or leadership decisions when engineering risk, capacity or quality requires it

Strong Bonus

• Firebase and Google Cloud experience.

• Native mobile app development across iOS and/or Android; React Native or comparable cross-platform experience is also useful.

• Experience with data-heavy operational products, external connectors, data freshness, source reconciliation and/or multi-tenant SaaS.

• Agriculture, farm-management software or other field-based operational technology experience.

About us

Ag Assist is a platform for running a farming business, built by people who actually farm. It started by connecting farm workers with the farms that needed them and is growing into a platform that brings farm operations, people and the rural marketplace together.

Food and fibre is New Zealand's largest export earner. We think there is a large opportunity to use better software and AI to help the sector make more from the data, people and resources it already has. That means building practical technology that works on real farms, not technology for its own sake.

Our Marketplace connects rural jobs, people, livestock, machinery and services. Our Operating System brings farm data and operational workflows into one place to support better day-to-day decisions. Workforce adds the people and execution layer. The value is in making these parts work together rather than building three separate products.

We are a small, fast-moving team. AI is embedded across product design, software development, testing, documentation and internal workflows so we can stay lean and move quickly. Plans will change when customer evidence, technical reality or business priorities change. What does not change is the expectation of clear ownership, early communication, high-quality output and follow-through.

We also believe people do their best work when they have room for real life. Family comes first, and we offer flexibility around family and personal commitments. That trust is reciprocal: we expect people to communicate clearly, own their work and deliver what they commit to.

Work on technology for the sector that underpins New Zealand's export economy, while helping define what AI-native software development looks like inside a real product company. Remain deeply hands-on and work directly with company leadership, engineers, farmers and industry partners in a small, engaged team