Senior Developer

About the job

We’re a Tauranga-based deep-tech startup building field instruments and intelligence platforms for industrial supply chains. We’re hiring a Senior Developer on a 6-month contract to take our MVP from working scaffold to pilot-ready product alongside our first customers.

About the role

You’ll design, implement, and own the software layer of our flagship field product — a rugged tablet-based instrument that integrates with sensing hardware and syncs decisions back to a cloud platform. You’ll work directly with our technical founders, mentor junior developers as the team grows, and ensure the codebase scales cleanly from MVP to pilot to production.

This is a hybrid role. Tauranga-based with flexibility to work remotely some of the week.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build scalable Python applications across the field instrument and cloud layers
• Integrate sensing hardware over USB and serial interfaces — driving instruments from Python, capturing data, processing signals, surfacing results in an operator UI
• Build and maintain AWS cloud infrastructure (API Gateway, Lambda, RDS Postgres, S3, Cognito, Fargate)
• Build offline-first behaviour with reliable sync — operators work in the field with intermittent connectivity
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues across hardware, signal processing, and cloud
• Collaborate with the founders on product priorities, architectural decisions, and customer pilots

Required experience

• Strong Python full-stack experience, including production deployment to AWS
• Proven hardware integration work — you’ve had Python (or equivalent) talking to a USB or serial instrument in a real product. Examples we’d find compelling: industrial sensors, medical devices, lab instruments, IoT controllers, robotics, 3D printing.
• Solid grounding in software architecture, system design, and scalable application development
• Database and data modelling fluency
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills across the full stack — including the hardware-software interface, where bugs are messy
• Fluent with AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and comfortable iterating on AI-generated scaffolds rather than rewriting from scratch

Nice to have

• Experience as the first or second engineer at an early-stage startup
• Experience with knowledge graphs, semantic data, or industrial data integration
• Java or C experience for adjacent or future hardware work
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent professional experience

Shape of Engagement

• 6-month contract, starting as soon as we find the right person
• Tauranga-based hybrid; flexible remote arrangement during the week
• Day rate negotiable based on experience — competitive for the NZ market
• High likelihood of extension