Senior Software Engineer

About Rico

Rico is a fast-growing New Zealand startup building tools that help planners and councils prepare and process planning applications (e.g. resource consents) more efficiently and consistently.

Resource consents shape almost every built outcome in NZ, from housing to infrastructure to farming and the current process is slow, fragmented, and costly. We’re fixing that.

We’re small and growing fast (team of 5+ and looking to hire 2 further roles in Q1 2026), so what you build will have a real and immediate impact and there’s plenty of room to grow.

Tasks

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who loves taking ownership of tricky problems, and shipping polished, reliable features quickly.

You’ll report directly to the CTO and help evolve our architecture, engineering practices, and development processes as we scale.

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Unique Engineering Opportunities

• Plan infrastructure: We maintain a tagged, hierarchical representation of council plan data, which needs to be kept up to date and versioned. This involves both code to automate as much of this as possible and internal software for the management of these plans.
• Complex report generation: Our software allows for customisable document generation, including a plethora of styling options, a highly configurable component library, and the ability to define custom components. This is achieved through our custom React reconcilers - one for DOCX output and one for a live HTML preview.
• Rich text editing at scale: Building advanced editing and review workflows on top of TipTap/ProseMirror, including tracked changes, comments, diffing, and document transformations.
• Production grade functional programming: Functional programming with Typescript and Effect for next level type safety and developer experience.
• UX challenges: Our customers work in a very technical domain (planning) but are not always comfortable with technology. We make complex technical assessments simple to complete.
• Architecture evolution: Helping redesign parts of our system to allow us to scale to more customers, new use cases, and more employees.
• Security & compliance engineering: Implementing ISO 27001 controls, strengthening our security posture, and designing processes that balance safety with developer velocity.

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Our Tech Environment

We use a modern, pragmatic stack focused on reliability and developer experience:

• Frontend: React + TypeScript, Effect, TipTap
• Backend: Node.js + TypeScript, Effect, Postgres
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Cloudformation)

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Able to work in office 3 or more days a week (based in Victoria Park / St Mary’s Bay, Auckland)
• Legally authorised to work in New Zealand

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We are looking for someone who:

• Has a strong track record of building high-quality web applications.
• Has experience leading or owning features in production systems.
• Enjoys taking initiative and ownership of problems.
• Is comfortable solving difficult and ambiguous problems.
• Communicates clearly, especially around trade-offs and constraints.
• Enjoys working with a CTO and contributing directly to architecture and product thinking.
• Has a broad experience: strong frontend skills (React/TypeScript), back-end fundamentals, and a good grasp of cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Is in their element learning new technologies.
• Cares deeply about code quality, maintainability, and developer experience.
• Has experience with, or is interested in learning about security and compliance (ISO27001 especially).

Benefits

• Competitive salary for NZ senior engineers ($160k more or less depending on experience).
• Opportunity to influence our technology and engineering culture as we scale.
• Fast feedback loops: what you build is used by planners across NZ within days.
• Autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to influence product decisions.
• A supportive, low-ego team that values speed, quality, and practicality.

You recognise yourself in this role and are keen to build impactful solutions to real-world challenges?

We’d love to hear from you!