Lead Software Engineer

Happy Co is a company where people can grow their careers and work with like minded people, with no egos or politics. Happy Co is values driven and offers a flexible, supportive culture. Join Happy Co and Make Work Happy!

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead who thrives in a fast-moving startup environment and is motivated by shipping valuable software quickly
. This is a hands-on, execution-focused leadership role
, not a people-management role. You’ll lead technical direction, prioritization, and decision-making
, ensuring the team delivers functionality that is immediately useful to customers—and can be iterated upon to unlock even more value.

You’ll work closely with Product and Design to turn customer needs into pragmatic solutions, balancing speed, quality, and long‑term sustainability across multiple products and codebases.

• 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 Happy Co needs.
• Lead sprint planning, daily technical discussions, and other delivery rituals with the Product Manager and Design Lead.

• 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/Type Script experience. (Our stack includes Go, Ruby on Rails, Type Script, Postgre
  
  SQL, and Graph
  
  QL)
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Founded in 2011, Happy Co () builds mobile and cloud solutions to enable real‑time property data. Our flagship product suite “Happy Property” has more than 5 million units on its platform.

We’re everyday people with a shared purpose — improving the lives of others. Our team is made up of thinkers, talkers, planners, makers, builders and everything in between. Together, we’re turning our passions into happier…