Lead Software Engineer

At Trade Me, we're about connecting Kiwi to create the life they want. Whether it's the big things like finding a home, a job, a car or growing their business, or the smaller things, like finding that right bedside table or parting ways with some old stuff. At Trade Me our vision is to be the place where Kiwi look first.

Trade Me’s Marketplace is one of New Zealand’s most popular, and we’re now modernising the critical applications and integrations that power it. As Lead Software Engineer, you’ll steer your team through complex technical challenges, partnering with Product, Design, a Principal Engineer and an Engineering Manager to find creative solutions. The foundations you build will serve Marketplace users for years to come, and you’ll grow the engineers around you along the way.

Here is what you can expect from this role:

• A critical Marketplace initiative to help lead, modernising key applications and integrations alongside a Principal Engineer and Engineering Manager.
• Close partnership with Product and Design to shape creative solutions to complex business problems, from discovery through to delivery.
• Architectural decisions to draft, communicate and execute, with a focus on scalability, sustainability and reduced coupling.
• Time on the tools: you’ll stay hands-on, developing, testing and deploying alongside your team.
• Large-scale changes, refactors and upgrades, delivered through strong scoping, estimation and stakeholder coordination.
• Mentorship that matters: hands-on guidance to help engineers grow, within a blameless, high-performing culture.
• The best AI tools at your fingertips to accelerate this complex initiative.
• Ownership of operability, tech debt and on-call in your area, using data to drive improvements.

What you will bring to our team:

• Proven leadership experience guiding and inspiring teams, fostering collaboration and achieving shared objectives.
• Deep hands-on coding expertise; peers come to you for advice on code, debugging and production environments.
• Architectural experience, having made decisions with long-term impact and seen how they shape development over years.
• A track record across complex projects, from BAU and large refactors to feature development and rapid prototyping, with an eye on performance, maintainability, scalability and security.
• Strong grounding in software development principles, design patterns and DevOps.
• Clear communication of complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills to collaborate, influence, manage conflict and make timely decisions.
• Hands-on experience developing with AI tools, and a natural curiosity to weave them into your everyday work.

You'll have the best time working at Trade Me, and this is why:

#AI and Tech: We live and breathe AI in our daily tasks. We value curiosity and an open mind towards new tech, offering dedicated AI skilling to help you grow and thrive in a fast-changing landscape.

#Flexibility: We support various work arrangements for this role, including part-time work, job sharing, and flexible working hours to help you achieve a healthy work-life balance. This includes an utilities allowance.

#Wellness: We prioritise your physical and mental wellbeing, providing access to various resources

#Invest in your family: We offer comprehensive parental leave policies to support parents.

#Leave: We support you with leave when you need it, including 5 days of wellness leave each year and 10 days of sick leave from day 1.

#Social: Company-paid shared lunches, regular social events, annual awards, employee networking groups, social sports clubs and more.

#Learning: Whether it's on the job, formal training, or mentoring, you'll grow with us from Day 1. We're big on internal mobility and look to our own talent first for new opportunities.

Our Commitment to Diversity: We’re firm believers that diversity fuels progress. To tackle existing inequality for women in technical leadership, we will be applying a preference for women when filling this role. The successful candidate will of course need to meet the core criteria for the role, and Trade Me will also take a broader perspective weighing up skills and experience alongside other factors such as future potential, diversity and the unique contribution you could make at Trade Me.

Trade Me is an INZ accredited employer. We truly value diversity and embrace a flexible workplace where people are encouraged to achieve their potential.

Check out the job description for this role here.