Senior Software Engineer

Build the software that serves the local church, and set the standard the rest of the team builds to, as we grow from a scale-up into a world-class engineering group. This is a senior, hands-on individual-contributor role with real ownership, foundational problems to solve, and room to grow.

Amazing Life exists to serve the local church, and the world's greatest mission deserves the world's greatest tools. We are moving from fast, informal systems to durable, scalable platforms without losing speed or ownership. The software you write here supports churches running services, caring for people, and reaching their communities. What you ship affects real people, every week.

You will build and run features end to end on our platform, a Node and Next.js application on AWS. You set the standard by shipping. A lot of what a mature engineering organization takes for granted has not been written here yet, and the patterns you establish doing real product work become the ones the rest of the team follows. You will have real ownership, in partnership with engineering leadership, of:

• Features from problem definition through to running in production, front end and back end
• The cloud architectural patterns you establish while building them, which the team then follows
• Foundational code and shared libraries that come out of real product work
• Coding standards, test coverage and deployment safety, and getting them adopted
• Code review and design feedback that makes the engineers around you better
• Mentoring, and the engineering culture that comes out of how you work

You will not be handed a fully specified ticket. Breaking a large, vague problem into increments that ship is a core part of the job.

Engineering runs a shared on-call rotation, so you support what you ship. We are early in building formal incident practice and you will help shape it, including blameless reviews, sustainable rotations, and recovery time after after-hours work.

This role grows in technical scope, architectural ownership, and influence. Near term you are deeply hands-on, shipping on the current platform and laying down the patterns the team builds on. Over time you take on larger and higher-stakes work, shape architecture beyond your immediate team, and grow other engineers. In your first 90 days, success looks like shipping meaningful changes to production, earning trust in code review, and landing at least one thing the rest of the team then builds on.

We are not a finished system today, and that is why this role exists. You will meet an older codebase nobody remembers writing, gaps in automation, and competing priorities. This role fits you if you:

• Enjoy building foundational systems during a scale-up, with broad ownership rather than a narrow remit
• Want your influence to show in other people's work, not only your own
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and making judgment calls
• Care about craft while respecting real-world trade-offs

It is likely not for you if you want narrowly scoped, ticket-driven work, or a codebase that is already clean.

Above all, we're looking for someone who learns fast and builds real capability in new, uncertain areas. That matters more than any single tool on your CV. The essentials:

• A genuine foundation in building production software end to end. You have shipped real systems and lived with them afterwards.
• Comfort working across the stack, or a clear appetite to get there.
• Calm, clear communication, with strong ownership and follow-through.

Everything below is a bonus rather than a requirement. You will not have experience with all of them, and any combination of skills in these areas is welcome:

• Node and TypeScript, or another modern server-side language
• React, or another modern front-end framework
• A major cloud infrastructure provider, ideally AWS
• Relational and non-relational databases
• Setting technical direction on a team while staying hands-on
• Setting coding standards or review practice that a team actually adopted
• Automated testing: unit, integration, and end to end
• CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
• Observability: metrics, logging, and tracing
• PHP and Laravel, or another long-lived framework you have worked inside

If you have a strong foundation in building software and a track record of picking up new areas quickly, we would like to hear from you, even if you do not match every line above.

• Location: Open to candidates based in New Zealand. Remote today; when we open an Auckland office, at least three days a week in the office, with the rest of the week remote or in the office at your discretion.
• Hours: Part of our engineering team is in India and our headquarters are in Dallas, Texas. The systems you work on run on US time, so some unconventional hours are occasionally needed to connect with colleagues in India and the US.
• Compensation: NZD 125,000–150,000.
• Level: L4, Senior Individual Contributor, reporting to engineering leadership.
• Measured on: delivery, engineering quality, and the standard you set around you.