Lead Software Engineer

HappyCo is a company where people can grow their careers and work with like minded people, with no egos or politics. They are seeking an Engineering Lead who thrives in a fast-moving startup environment to lead technical direction, prioritization, and decision-making while delivering valuable software quickly.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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