Senior Product Engineer (ANZ) - Offers

Job Description

Title:

Senior Product Engineer

Reports to:

Lead Engineer

Location:

New Zealand (Remote)

Direct Reports:

0

Last Updated:

November 2026

Role purpose

As a Senior Product Engineer at Optimal, you’ll contribute to the evolution of our user research platform with a strong product and experience focus.

You'll lead projects end-to-end as the Engineer at the table, working with Product and Design on your team to go from idea to delivery. That means a full seat in shaping the project, navigating how it gets delivered, and owning the engineering all the way through to UI finesse and feature behaviour. You'll work closely with our Tech Leads, fellow Product Engineers, and Product Designers and Managers to take new ideas to market quickly and iterate based on real-world usage.

As a Senior Engineer on a small team, you won't just write code. You'll set technical direction, raise the bar on craft, and mentor others. This is an opportunity to take real ownership of meaningful projects, align with broader goals of the business, and have a direct impact on a product used by teams around the world.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead projects end-to-end: Take engineering ownership of meaningful features and initiatives, from early-stage exploration through enterprise-ready delivery
• Have a full seat at the table: Work with product and design on your team to shape the project, navigate delivery, and have real say from architecture down to UI finesse and feature behaviour
• Build and ship experiences: Design, build, and ship new research features that delight users and make complex tasks feel simple
• Work across the full stack: Deliver across React, Ruby on Rails and AWS, with the depth to move confidently from frontend UX to backend services
• Shape product direction: Stay close to the problem space and user needs, actively shaping where the product goes through hands-on exploration
• Set the technical bar: Contribute to architecture decisions, raise the standard of craft, and mentor others on the team
• Move fast and iterate: Take new ideas to market quickly and improve them based on real-world usage
• Mentor and collaborate: Share your expertise, guiding the team in best practices while learning from others, fostering a culture of continuous improvement
• Share on-call duties (optional): Join a scheduled rotation, respond quickly to urgent production alerts, and keep our critical systems running smoothly outside business hours.

Skills and experience needed to be successful:

• Senior Full-Stack Engineer: Deep, hands-on experience building and shipping product across the stack: React on the frontend, Ruby on Rails on the backend, deployed on AWS
• Strong product mindset: You build with the user in mind and care about the "why" as much as the "how"
• Excellent frontend engineering: Strong React experience and strong UI skills, so you can build beautiful, performant interfaces
• Creative and opinionated: You bring taste and care into your craft, and can prototype and polish with equal flair
• Leadership and ownership: You're comfortable leading projects and taking responsibility for outcomes, from idea through delivery and beyond
• AI-curious: An interest in integrating modern AI tools into user-facing products, and in using AI to build better software, faster
• Entrepreneurial spirit: You're proactive, self-starting, and love creating new things
• Team collaborator: You thrive in open, creative, cross-functional environments

What success looks like:

• You’ve delivered features that directly improve our customer experience, working closely with Product, Design and other teams to meet shared goals
• You’ve taken ownership of key technical decisions, balancing delivery pace with long-term maintainability
• You contribute actively to team rituals (standups, retros, planning), and share your opinion to help improve how we work
• You’ve helped raise the bar for quality by sharing feedback, mentoring others, or improving documentation and testing practices
• You show strong product thinking, contributing to what we build, not just how
• You demonstrate alignment with our values - showing ownership, curiosity, and a commitment to customer impact

Values and culture

Our values are key to our business and underpin the way we work. The behaviours behind our values serve as our guiding principles, shaping our interactions and decision making and are deeply embedded in how we operate as a team.

• Live In Our Customers’ Shoes
  We succeed when our customers do. We deeply understand their experiences - because we live them too. We think about our customer, we talk to our customer and we act with purpose to add value every single day.
• Own It
  We show up with curiosity and accountability and we do it at pace. We challenge with care, support each other, and commit fully - because we’re in this to win.
• Bold & Brave
  We are daring, adaptive and always learning. Change doesn’t shake us, it fuels us.
• In It Together
  We lead with kindness, empathy, and respect. We challenge each other with care and compassion. We work hard and celebrate our wins.