Urban Planning - Digital Solutions Specialist

Rico is a fast-growing planning technology company that creates a platform for preparing and processing resource consents. We’re a tightknit, highly engaged group with a growing customer base of planning consultancies and councils across New Zealand and Australia.

Our ambition is big, but practical: make planning applications and decision-making processes faster, and more consistent.

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Tasks

We're looking for a planner with resource consent experience who wants to do something genuinely different - shaping how technology is applied in planning practice across New Zealand, Australia and beyond.

The role

This role sits at the intersection of planning practice and technology - with a focus on people.

Your job is to help our customers translate the way they already assess applications and make decisions into streamlined digital workflows in Rico. You'll be the bridge between how a planning team actually approaches planning and how our technology can make that work faster and more consistently.

Our customers are the local experts. Your role is to understand their process at a technical planning level, educate them on what Rico can do, and give them practical insight into how technology can best be applied to their way of doing things.

In practice, that means:

• Helping new customers work out how to incorporate Rico to streamline their initial scoping/triaging of projects (identifying relevant planning parameters), decision-making processes, and report templates
• Helping existing customers optimise their templates for usability, speed and responding to regulatory change
• Working closely with customer planning teams to understand their needs and process, and integrating Rico functionality to make their decision-making more streamlined and better quality
• Supporting the rest of our customer-facing team - sales, onboarding, and retention - on the specific planning work behind each customer, and how it translates into technology
• Feeding what you learn back into our product and technology as it continues to develop

You’ll work alongside the existing planning expertise on the team, as we look to boost our capabilities across the above areas to handle our growing customer base and upcoming regulatory changes. You’ll also help shape our product and define how planning and technology interact.

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Requirements

About you

Planning experience - either processing or preparing applications - is a must.

Any experience in the following is a real bonus:

• developing templates and processes for a planning team
• working with a planning team to push the adoption of new technology or new ways of working

The ideal candidate is really three parts:

• One part planning expertise - enough technical grounding to understand planning decision-making as a process, and to speak credibly with planners about how they assess and decide.
• One part people skills - comfortable working with customer teams to understand their needs, get them onboard and bought in, and tailor solutions that give them an outcome they're happy with while making the most of what technology can offer.
• One part hungry to grow - this is a unique opportunity in the industry, so you’ll likely need to learn new skills for the job + we’re a growing business in a changing industry, so you’ll need to keep learning as our product, customers and the regulatory environments we operate in all evolve

You don't need to be a technologist, the focus will be on planning processes and working with customers. Comfort with everyday digital tools (we use G-suite, Notion, CRM etc.) is all, and we'll support you to learn any more technical aspects of the role as you go.

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Benefits

What it’s like working at Rico

We’re a high-performing, nimble team, which means:

• You’ll be adaptable and work across a wide range of tasks
• You’ll have real influence over how things are done
• You’ll learn quickly and have the opportunity to shape your role as the company grows
• Your planning expertise will directly influence how the product evolves

This is a rare opportunity for a planner who wants something different - intellectually challenging, practical, and impactful - while working alongside fast-moving technology that’s creating real change in the industry.

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If you’re motivated, curious, and keen to help improve how planning works at a system level, just apply! We’d love to hear from you.