Lead Software Engineer

About the Role

Join HappyCo as a hands-on Engineering Lead to drive technical direction and ship valuable software quickly in a fast-paced startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team across multiple products and codebases, driving the delivery of high-quality, performant solutions.
• Own technical direction and standards, fostering a culture of automated testing, observability, and operational excellence.
• Address urgent customer needs by triaging and solving support tickets, balancing short-term fixes with root cause resolution.
• Partner with Product and Design to translate customer needs into pragmatic, impactful solutions.
• Identify and manage technical risks, debt, and architectural concerns, making pragmatic decisions to balance speed and quality.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders about scope, tradeoffs, timelines, and expectations.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience with Go or Ruby on Rails, plus strong JavaScript/TypeScript experience.
• 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 technical decisions.
• Track record of shipping production software that customers actively use.
• Comfortable making tradeoffs to balance speed, quality, and scalability.
• Clear communicator capable of aligning engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders.
• Relevant tertiary qualifications (e.g., Bachelor/Graduate degree in Science/Computer Science/Software Engineering, IT certification) or equivalent experience.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with PostgreSQL and GraphQL.
• Familiarity with building and maintaining systems in a remote-first environment.