Lead Software Engineer

What You’ll Do (Day to Day)

Lead a team of engineers across several products and codebases, breaking down work and driving delivery of high-quality, performant solutions.

Own technical direction and standards, driving a strong culture of automated testing, observability, and operational excellence through activities such as hands-on code review.

Address urgent customer needs by triaging and solving Support tickets, balancing short-term fixes with resolving the deeper root causes.

Partner with Product and Design to ensure the team is always working on the most valuable problems, identifying the simplest viable solution to quickly deliver customer impact.

Deliver functionality that is immediately useful, then guide iterative improvements to expand customer value over time.

Identify risks, technical debt, and architectural concerns early, and make pragmatic decisions about when to invest vs. move fast.

Communicate clearly with stakeholders about scope, tradeoffs, timelines, and expectations—from Support issues to new product features.

Present and document significant architectural shifts to Engineering leaders, and regularly communicate performance to ensure system architecture addresses customer and HappyCo needs.

Lead sprint planning, daily technical discussions, and other delivery rituals with the Product Manager and Design Lead.

What We’re Looking For

Relevant tertiary qualifications (e.g. Bachelor/Graduate degree in Science/Computer Science/Software Engineering, IT certification or similar) or equivalent experience.

5+ years experience with Go or Ruby on Rails, plus strong JavaScript/TypeScript experience. (Our stack includes Go, Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and GraphQL)

Proven ability to lead technical work across multiple systems in a startup or fast-changing environment.

Strong product and customer intuition, with the ability to translate business needs into concrete technical decisions.

Track record of shipping production software that customers actively use.

Comfortable making tradeoffs to balance speed, quality, and scalability.

Clear communicator who can align engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders.

What This Role Is (and Is Not)

This role is:

Focused on technical leadership, execution, and delivery.

Centered on customer value and business outcomes.

Hands-on and decision-oriented.

This role is not:

A people-management role.

Responsible for team career development, performance reviews, or regular 1:1s.

A purely architectural or advisory position.

How We Measure Success

The team consistently ships valuable, reliable software with tight customer feedback loops.

Support volume and severity decrease as root causes are addressed.

Delivery is predictable, with clear tradeoffs, communication, and improvement paths.

Technical decisions enable the team to move quickly today without introducing unnecessary technical debt for tomorrow.