Lead Software Engineer

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.
• 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.