Happy Cog

Lead Software Engineer

Happy Cog • US
GoTypeScript Remote
HappyCo is a company where people can grow their careers and work with like minded people, with no egos or politics. HappyCo is values driven and offers a flexible, supportive culture. Join HappyCo and Make Work Happy!

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.
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  • 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.