Head of Engineering

We help around 2,000 New Zealand employers offer bikes and e-bikes as a free, streamlined employee benefit. This makes the daily commute healthier, more affordable, and far more sustainable. Employees at participating organisations can save between 32% and 63% on their dream ride through our free, pre-tax benefit programme. Workride is now entering its scale-up phase, with new product and service lines on the way, and the platform needs an owner. We’re looking for a hands-on Head of Engineering to join our Christchurch team, take the platform from founder-built to team-built, and establish the foundations that will carry Workride into its next stage of growth. Our Mission We help around 2,000 New Zealand employers offer bikes and e-bikes as a free, streamlined employee benefit. This makes the daily commute healthier, more affordable, and far more sustainable. Employees at participating organisations can save between 32% and 63% on their dream ride through our free, pre-tax benefit programme. Workride is now entering its scale-up phase, with new product and service lines on the way, and the platform needs an owner. We’re looking for a hands-on Head of Engineering to join our Christchurch team, take the platform from founder-built to team-built, and establish the foundations that will carry Workride into its next stage of growth. The Role: You will own the engineering at Workride, implementing the product roadmap, planning and executing the sprints, delivering the product, and building the technical team around you. The majority of the week will be designing and building while our team grows and increases our engineering capacity. Workride has grown using PaaS tooling, which enabled rapid development and iteration as we built the functionality our customers required. We are now entering the scale-up phase, which means progressively moving beyond our existing PaaS tooling. You will own the staged migration to Workride’s future operating environment while ensuring continued uptime for a business that trades every day of the week. The Head of Engineering role offers a ground-floor seat in a rapidly growing company. You will have the opportunity to define our engineering frameworks, build the team, and work alongside the wider Workride team as we deliver new products and services that ultimately get more people on bikes. What You'll Be Doing Rebuild & Scale Workride Plus Workride Plus is entering its next phase of exponential growth. Year one is about rebuilding our underlying platform infrastructure from the ground up so it can scale effortlessly. Rearchitect our core transaction engines to support high-throughput payment flows, real-time ledgers, and complex state changes across the product lifecycle. Overhaul reporting and data pipelines from the ground up to deliver audit-grade operational, compliance, and financial data straight from system sources. Improve onboarding workflows by integrating modern verification, identity, and compliance controls—paving the way for friction-free expansion into new market segments. Rebuild the end-to-end asset lifecycle platform , moving operational edge cases into our core operating system with robust, automated workflows. Modernize the Platform for the Next Decade You will take ownership of the tech stack roadmap, making key architectural calls on what to refactor, what to decouple, and how to scale system capacity multi-fold. Lead zero-downtime component migrations , systematically rebuilding parts of the stack while our live, daily trading operations keep running smoothly. Improve platform resiliency from the ground up , elevating security posture, access controls, backups, and disaster recovery. Hands-On Engineering Leadership Spend the majority of your week designing, building, and shipping code personally —staying deeply grounded in technical execution rather than managing from afar. Rebuild engineering practices from the ground up , establishing sprint cadences, estimation standards, and deployment pipelines that make releases calm and predictable. Improve quality and uptime targets (99%+) , setting the standard for bug triage, incident response, and performance under load. Grow the engineering team and establish the foundational frameworks, patterns, and culture that future engineers will inherit. What You Bring to the Team The Essentials: You have 8+ years building production software, including senior or lead ownership of systems in the finance space: payments, billing, receivables, lending, or adjacent. You have written production code recently and you want to keep writing it. You have moved a live system to a new stack or architecture in stages, without material downtime. You have been the first engineering leader, or led a small team, and the standards you set outlasted you. You are comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room, making calls with imperfect information and owning them. You are based in Christchurch with full right to work in NZ, or committed to relocating (our office is in the CBD). Bonus Points for: Regulated environment exposure: consumer credit, KYC and AML, or privacy. Accounting or ledger integration experience (Xero or similar). Experience directing external contractors alongside an internal team. A genuine interest in cycling, sustainability, health, or workplace wellness! What Success Looks Like in Your First 12 Months Complete Technical Ownership: Full ownership of the platform has seamlessly transitioned to engineering without customer disruption, with access, workflows, and observability fully established within the team. Core Engine Overhaul: The core transactional platform and ledger engines have been rebuilt from the ground up on the future-state stack, delivering high reliability and scale. Automated Workflows in Production: Onboarding, verification, and core billing engine pipelines are live and operational, supporting high-volume growth across key customer segments. Modular Architecture & Migration: A phased zero-downtime migration is actively underway with initial components live, proving the platform is modular enough for new offerings to be configured rather than rebuilt. Scalable Engineering Foundations: Engineering standards, environments, CI/CD pipelines, and documentation have been established from the ground up, allowing new engineers to onboard quickly and enabling the team to scale smoothly beyond you. Why You'll Love It Here Real Ownership: A rare mandate, full ownership of engineering and a re-platform, with a profitable, fast-growing business behind it. Awesome Culture: A supportive, high-performing Christchurch team culture with great work life balance. The Ultimate Perk?!: Full access to Workride's employee bike benefit scheme so you can get your dream bike or e-bike! Be careful - don't provide your bank or credit card details when applying for jobs. Don't transfer any money or complete suspicious online surveys. If you see something suspicious, report this job ad . #J-18808-Ljbffr