Key Facts

Role: Software Engineer

Levels: Intermediate

Salaries:

NZD $121k

Location: Anywhere in New Zealand

Hours:  37.5 hours a week

Team size:  Small, cross-functional product squads

Full Benefits

• We have transparent salaries, which is set globally for all our staff
• 20 days paid leave with extra leave based on tenure, 20 days sick leave
• Fully remote team across different timezones
• Macbook + NZD $3,000 for home office setup
• Health Insurance coverage
• Advance your skills, learn new techniques, and be surrounded by a talented and supportive team
• Thrive as you help us build a high-growth company to improve the work lives of thousands

Who are we looking for?

You’re an intermediate engineer who can deliver high-quality product work, communicate clearly, and make good trade-offs. You enjoy collaborating with product and design, and you care about maintainability, performance, and user experience. You are excited about boosting your work through AI agents, without losing sight of quality outcomes.

We recognise that soft skills are just as important as intricate technical knowledge and we try to build our team with a mix of both. We want people who are willing to empathise with our customers and give them the best experience. If you feel limited at your current job, we want to talk to you.

Because we are a remote company, communication is a vital skill. We prefer people that over-communicate and are willing to respond quickly. So much of what we do is over Slack and Linear and we want to see your personality come through when you write.

If you're someone who excels at producing high-quality work and is dedicated to delivering positive outcomes for customers, you'll fit right in with our team. We believe in setting high standards for ourselves and we're always looking for ways to improve and grow.

We’re open to different backgrounds, but you should be able to succeed with the responsibilities below.

Key responsibilities

1. Build and ship customer-facing product experiences. Deliver polished features across both frontend and backend. Ensure changes are reliable, accessible, and performant.
2. Own work end-to-end. Take ownership from discovery and technical design through implementation, testing, release, and iteration.
3. Leverage AI. Stay current with AI-enabled coding approaches. Creatively apply AI to all aspects of your work.
4. Raise engineering quality. Improve patterns, reduce tech debt, strengthen testing, and contribute to a healthy codebase through reviews and thoughtful refactoring.
5. Collaborate and communicate in a remote team. Work effectively async, write clear updates, and partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to deliver outcomes.
6. Support the team through mentoring and feedback. Help more junior engineers level up through pairing, reviews, sharing context and best practices.

Key challenges

• Maintaining a growth mindset in the face of our rapidly changing industry
• Increasing productivity through AI without compromising security, quality or integrity.
• Balancing speed and quality while building in a small team
• Making good trade-offs under ambiguity and changing customer needs
• Collaborating effectively across time zones in an async environment
• Keeping the bar high on code quality, testing, and maintainability as we scale

Must have

• 3+ years of professional experience as a developer
• Strong experience building production web applications (preferably React and Typescript)
• Solid fundamentals in modern frontend engineering (state management, performance, testing)
• Experience working with APIs (preferably GraphQL) and relational databases (preferably Postgres)
• Experience with AI coding tools and approaches
• Comfort owning work end-to-end and shipping iteratively
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in a remote setting
• High standards for code quality, security, testing, maintainability

Nice to have

• Experience with Node.js backend development
• Experience with defining and operating production infrastructure
• Experience with Cypress, Vitest, CI
• Experience working in Shape Up (or similar) delivery cycles
• Experience with Ruby on Rails (legacy stack)
• Experience with security standards and compliance

Attitude

• Curious and eager to learn
• Pragmatic: biased toward action and shipping value
• Empathetic and collaborative: you raise the team, not just the code
• Thoughtful about trade-offs and able to explain decisions clearly
• Comfortable with ownership and accountability

Our Technology

‍‍Runn is built using a modern development stack: React, Node, Typescript, Fastify, Hasura, GraphQL, Postgres. Tested with Cypress and Vitest, deployed via Github Actions, hosted on Heroku. We use cutting edge AI for coding and all the work around it.

What’s it like working at Runn?

Runn follows the Shape Up methodology with some modifications that work better for our team.

You’ll work in eight week cycles: Six weeks of project work, followed by two weeks of self-directed cooldown time to work on smaller tactical improvements, reduce our technical debt or improve your craft. Before each cycle starts, the upcoming work is shared with the engineering team, and engineers can put their hand up to work on projects.

Each project team is made up of two engineers and one product designer, with the explicit goal of having a releasable feature at the end of the cycle.

We currently have three streams of work each cycle:

• Two product streams which work on significant new product features or improvements
• One support stream which focuses on any customer issues and bug fixes.

While most of the engineering team is centred around the NZ timezone, you may work with someone who is a few timezones away . It’s up to each team to decide the best way to communicate, whether that’s fully async, or if they occasionally have scheduled calls to discuss ongoing work. Flexibility is key.

At the start of each cycle, teams commit to delivering features to a scope they decide. This scope should be a useful and releasable feature that customers can use without any additional work required. This requires being ruthless and focused on what provides value and what is nice to have.

Transparent Salaries

Runn has a transparent and equal pay policy, which means that all employees in the same role and level receive the same starting compensation regardless of location. We do not negotiate individual salaries. We additionally pay people more the longer they stay at Runn. This policy ensures that all employees are treated fairly and equitably. Your final compensation will depend on your local tax laws.

What does Runn actually do?

Runn’s vision is “a world where neither time nor talent is wasted”.

Runn empowers leaders to run dynamic and impactful organizations. Through real-time workforce management, we unleash talent within organizations and their broader networks. By aligning each person’s capabilities, capacity, and interests with the specific needs of every initiative, we help build teams that are not only the right fit but also highly engaged and effective at achieving great outcomes.

Our product provides a project and resource management platform for large organisations to manage their upcoming projects and workforce. We have a commitment to putting people first, with a focus on creating well planned projects that bring the right team of people together to deliver projects on time while looking after the team’s time.

We have a strong focus on user experience and design, and keep true to our values of Beauty, Excellence, Adventure and Transparency.

We of course use Runn internally with our team of ~30, while also having Fortune 100 companies with thousands of staff being managed and planned in Runn.

Hiring Process

Roles at Runn are highly competitive with many applications applying for few roles. When applying you must include a cover letter/email. It should outline your motivation for applying, your experience and an example of previous work you’re proud of.

Any applications that do not include the above or are generated by AI will be rejected with an automated message.

All those who take the time and effort to write a detailed cover letter will receive a personal response from the team. At Runn, we value your time just as much as our own. This is why we always ensure during our process you are spending 1-on-1 time with one of our team.

Interview Process

Our interview process is at follows, we'll filter candidates at each of these steps:

• Review of cover letter and resume
• Self-recorded video (5 min)
• Experience and team fit (45 min)
  • A discussion about your background, experience, and how you might fit within the team.
  • We’ll ask you about your relevant experience
  • You ask us questions about anything
  • We rate your communication, engagement and enquiry skills
• Technical interview (60 min)
  • We’ll ask you to share in detail an achievement you are proud of
  • We’ll ask you a series of engineering related questions. These are general software engineering questions rather than specific code-related questions
• Coding Interview (60 min)
  • A hands-on interview where smart use of AI is strongly encouraged
• Meet the Team (30 min)
  • An opportunity to meet members of the Runn team you’d likely be working with

Completing a deep interview process means we aren’t able to provide a definitive timeline. You should receive an initial response within two weeks, and the entire process can take anywhere from four to eight weeks. We do understand you may have other roles you are applying for, so please let us know of any timeline constraints.

Runn is an equal opportunity employer

We’re committed to building an inclusive workplace, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds.

We believe diversity is a strength and value the different perspectives, experiences, and ideas that people bring. Today, 53% of our team are women, including 57% of our leadership team, and we have a female CEO. While we’re proud of this progress, we know there’s always more to do and remain committed to improving.

We strongly encourage applications from women (cis and trans), non-binary people, people of marginalised ethnicities, and members of the rainbow community.

If you need any support or accommodations during the hiring process, please let us know—we’re here to help.

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