TL;DR (too long; didn't read): Are you an expert technical leader ready to own, define, and scale the Engineering function for a high-impact wellbeing technology startup?
Join Komodo and become the Thought Partner to our Co-founder/CPO, as well as the strategic technical voice responsible for translating our recent fundraise into product maturity and global growth. If you thrive on deep technical problem-solving, enjoy building and mentoring teams, and want your architectural decisions to directly shape a mission-driven company, this is your opportunity to own and lead the entire technical trajectory.
Komodo is helping schools across the world lead with wellbeing through insight, education, and a platform built to scale.
Why should you join us?
You’ll work on purposeful problems that matter, alongside a global and growing team who care deeply about impact, culture, and doing good work with good people. Your contribution won’t just move the needle, it’ll shape the whole dial.
At a glance
Role title: Lead Software Engineer
️ Role level: Senior Manager (M2) & Principal (E4)
Reports to: Chief Product Officer
Start date: ASAP
Location: Christchurch, NZ
Hours: Full-time, permanent
Salary: Depending on experience
Why This Role Exists
This is a newly created, critical role that marks a significant investment in Komodo's future.
Having recently closed our latest fundraising round, we are at an inflection point where we want to deploy capital strategically to accelerate our product's maturity and scale.
This hire fills a crucial gap: a dedicated, senior technical leader within the business. You will be the proven expert responsible for establishing the technical vision and engineering excellence needed to take our platform to the next level. Your unique contribution will be to translate our growth ambitions into a scalable, high-quality technical roadmap, ensuring engineering is a strategic, value-creation function for the business.
Your success directly influences our ability to grow our impact for the schools we currently serve and the many more we plan to reach.
What You'll Own
This role requires a deep technical expert ready to shape our technology and team. You will have full ownership of the Engineering function; the team and its impact.
Thought Partner to our Co-founder & CPO: Work collaboratively with our Chief Product Officer to help curate our roadmap and build ambitious, value-adding features that customers love.
Strategic Technical Ownership: Serve as the company-wide expert in engineering, setting standards and shaping the technical strategy for our platform and infrastructure.
Engineering Culture and Momentum: Responsible for building, fostering, and driving momentum through an engaging engineering culture.
System Architecture and Quality: Own the overall system architecture, ensuring high quality, performance, and long-term stability across all engineering outputs. You will be responsible for continuous improvement and raising the bar for the entire technical function.
People Leadership and Management: Take ownership of the day-to-day management of the Engineering Team, as well as more strategic people leadership through 1:1s, feedback cycles, and annual performance reviews.
Goal Execution and Delivery: Lead the execution of engineering key results as part of our company quarterly goals.
High-Stakes Problem Solving: Lead the resolution of ambiguous, cross-cutting, and high-stakes technical problems that require deep insight and long-term thinking.
Cross-Functional Strategy: Provide an expert voice from an engineering perspective in strategy-level conversations with the Leadership Team.
Roadmap and Process Improvement: Define and refine engineering practices, tools, and processes, ensuring reliable execution and high-quality delivery aligned with company goals.
What Success Looks Like
We measure success by meaningful, observable changes to the role you're already doing. Here's the impact we'd expect you to have in your first three to six months:
Engineering Clarity: You have completed a robust technical audit and established the critical priorities, risks, and a clearly articulated 12-month technical roadmap for the Leadership Team.
Process Maturity: You have implemented and socialised a standardised engineering practice, including coding standards, deployment rhythms, and quality control, leading to a measurable uplift in the stability and predictability of delivery.
Team Development: Your two direct reports are receiving consistent, high-quality coaching, and you have documented clear development pathways for both individuals, ensuring they feel supported, challenged, and know their next steps for growth. Build the Engineering team over time, identifying great talent and culture fits that elevate us.
Cross-Functional Trust: You have successfully integrated as the Engineering expert in leadership discussions, translating complex technical insights into clear, strategic narratives that inform product and business decisions.
Build Momentum: You have built a sense of proactive momentum within the engineering team, leading the execution of key quarterly results on time and to a high standard, while fostering an engaged and open engineering culture.
Must haves
To ensure a great fit for this high-autonomy role, candidates must demonstrate:
Proven Technical Prowess: Extensive experience operating at a Director of Eng, Principal or equivalent senior-most technical level, with a track record of setting technical standards and raising quality across an entire function or domain. Experience with some of our tech stack.
Engineering Leadership and Ownership: Demonstrated ability to own the entire Engineering function, providing technical vision, setting the long-term technical roadmap, and making high-leverage architectural decisions.
Commercial and Product Judgement: Demonstrated ability to balance technical quality with commercial realities, knowing when to optimise for speed and customer value versus when to protect long-term platform health in a scaling SaaS business.
Strategic Problem Solving: Proven ability to solve ambiguous, cross-cutting, and high-stakes technical problems, translating complexity into simple, clear narratives for non-technical leadership and stakeholders.
System Building and Maturity: Direct experience transitioning an engineering function from initial or manual processes to automated, scalable, and high-quality systems, demonstrating an understanding of when and how to scale tools and processes.
Mindset and Attitude: A self-aware, growth-minded leader who operates with a high degree of autonomy, embraces candour, and is prepared to communicate technical risks and hard truths directly and transparently.
People and Culture Focus: Experience in strategic people leadership, including coaching, mentoring, and setting clear development pathways for direct reports and the wider team.
Nice to haves
We know that great talent comes from many backgrounds. While not essential, the following experience would provide an advantage:
SaaS and Startup Context: Prior experience in a high-growth startup or scaling SaaS environment, particularly with product-led growth metrics or recurring revenue models (ARR, retention, etc.).
Domain Alignment: Experience or passion for the education or wellbeing technology sector, and a strong belief in the Komodo mission.
Expert Track Mentorship: Experience in mentorship or guiding technical talent outside of a direct reporting line, helping to elevate the capability of engineers across different specialties.
Infrastructure and Security: Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure management (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and best practices in application security and compliance.
Building a Foundation While Scaling: You will be taking on the entire engineering function as its owner, which means you'll need to define and implement processes, tools, and standards while simultaneously supporting the delivery of a platform already operating across 30+ countries. This requires balancing immediate needs with long-term strategic maturity.
Shaping the Team and Mentorship: With only two direct reports to start, you will be highly hands-on with individual contributions while also needing to develop and mentor those reports and define the future growth trajectory of the wider engineering team. You must be comfortable switching between deep technical work and leadership/coaching.
Ambiguity and Autonomy in Technical Direction: You will be responsible for setting the technical roadmap and standards, often needing to solve ambiguous, cross-cutting, and high-stakes problems. You must be able to move forward with high autonomy, making high-leverage decisions, even when perfect information isn't available, and communicating risks early.
Cross-Functional Pressure and Alignment: As the engineering owner, you'll be the primary point of contact for Product, Operations, and Leadership. You'll need to translate complex technical decisions into clear narratives for non-specialists and drive strong cross-functional alignment, particularly when balancing resource constraints and competing priorities.
️ How We Work
Location and Collaboration: This is a full-time, permanent role based in our Christchurch, NZ office. We are an office-first team with a strong culture of in-person collaboration.
Responsible Autonomy: We trust our team to manage their time responsibly and offer flexibility. You will have the autonomy to decide how you get the work done, provided the needs of our customers and the wellbeing of our teammates are always at the forefront.
Learning and Candour: We have a strong culture of continuous improvement and encourage giving and receiving feedback in a considerate way. Proactiveness is a necessity.
How to Apply
Interested? Apply via the link and tell us why this role with Komodo speaks to you.
We know from research that people, especially women and those from under-represented groups, often hesitate to apply unless they meet close to every listed requirement. If this role sounds like it could be a good match, even if you do not tick every box, we would still love to hear from you.
We sometimes use artificial intelligence tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us review applications or understand experience at scale. These tools simply assist our team and they never replace human judgement. Every decision about progressing or hiring a candidate is made by real people. If you would like to understand how your data is used as part of this process, you’re welcome to get in touch with us.
Read authentic reviews with a Glassdoor account. Only apply to jobs you love.