Senior Product Engineer - Platform Leaning

Optimal is a comprehensive user insight platform empowering product teams and UX researchers to make confident, data-driven decisions.

We provide a powerful suite that transforms complex human behaviours into actionable insights. Our platform helps our customers understand how people interact with their digital experiences, revealing the "why" behind user behaviours so they can build products that truly connect with their audience.

We work with industry leaders like Lego, Nike, Netflix and Apple, to bridge the gap between user expectations and product reality.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer to join our Innovation team, a cross-functional crew building the next generation of user research tools. This team is focused on rapid development and market delivery of new, inventive ways to conduct research at scale.

This is a senior, full-stack role with a platform and DevOps lean. You'll be shipping customer-facing product changes alongside the team, but your distinctive strength is the platform muscle underneath it: designing, deploying, and operating the systems that let the Innovation team ship fast and scale confidently. When things get really spicy from a platform point of view, you're the engineer the team leans on.

You'll work closely with our Head of Product Innovation, fellow Product Engineers, an AI engineer, and a Product Designer to take new ideas to market quickly and iterate based on real-world usage.

You'll also be part of our Platform Guild, a group of platform-leaning engineers from across Optimal who keep tabs on the company's overarching platform needs. So while you're embedded in the Innovation team day-to-day, you'll help shape platform direction beyond it.

As a senior Engineer on a small team, you won't just write code. You'll set technical direction, raise the bar on how we build and operate software, and mentor others. This is an opportunity to take real ownership of meaningful projects and have a direct impact on a product used by teams around the world.

What you'll do:

• Ship customer-facing product: Design, build, and ship customer-facing research features alongside the team. Platform is your strength, but delivering product is core to the role
• Build the platform muscle: Architect and develop the infrastructure and automation that lets us ship fast into scalable, observable, secure, and reliable systems
• Be the muscle when it gets spicy: Step up as the engineer the team leans on when the hard platform problems hit, from thorny scaling and reliability challenges to tricky deploys
• Work across the full stack: Deliver across Ruby on Rails and AWS, with enough frontend (React) to contribute across the product
• Champion reliability and security by design: Bring a strong operational and security perspective to product development, influencing architecture and helping the team adopt pragmatic practices
• Contribute to the Platform Guild: Represent the Innovation team in a cross-team group of platform-leaning engineers that keeps tabs on Optimal's overarching platform needs
• Shape product direction: Stay close to the problem space and user needs, actively shaping where the product goes through hands-on exploration
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with designers, product, and AI engineers to prototype, validate, and refine new product ideas
• Set the technical bar: Contribute to architecture decisions, improve how we ship and operate software, and mentor others on the team

What we're looking for

• Senior full-stack engineer: Deep, hands-on experience building and shipping product across the stack, deployed on AWS
• Platform and DevOps strength: Hands-on experience with AWS, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and operating software in production. This is where you're strongest
• Strong backend depth: Strong Ruby on Rails experience (or equivalent), with enough frontend (React) to deliver across the product
• Product-minded with a platform lean: You enjoy building customer-facing products, and you care deeply about how software is deployed, operated, and secured in production
• Pragmatic problem-solving: You see the bigger picture and break it into actionable steps that solve the right problems efficiently
• 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
• Team collaborator: You thrive in open, creative, cross-functional environments

What's in it for you:

• Competitive salary that reflects your skills and experience, plus an opportunity to join our Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) to help you benefit from the long-term success of the company
• Annual wellbeing allowance and support
• Generous annual learning and development support
• Home office set-up support
• 4 weeks annual leave plus an additional day off on your birthday
• Opportunities for professional growth and development
• Flexible, remote-first working (our HQ is based in Wellington, NZ, but this role can be based anywhere in New Zealand or Australia)