Senior Software Engineer

Salary: $140,000 – $165,000 per year

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join a five-person, AI-first engineering team in Takapuna, Auckland. The stack is TypeScript, React Native and Firebase on Google Cloud. Ideally you bring a DevOps or platform background alongside full-stack experience, and you'll help set the bar for how we use coding agents. Four days a week in the office, Thursdays from home. Claude Max for every engineer.

About Sea-Flux

We build the SaaS platform for maritime vessel compliance and safety. Our browser and cross-platform mobile applications help vessels and crew to stay safe and compliant on the high seas.

Built for seafarers, by seafarers, we're on a mission to make a real difference in the maritime industry. We're a Kiwi business with big ambitions, and this is an exciting opportunity to join us as we expand worldwide. The best boats and safest vessels run Sea-Flux.

The Role

This is a full-time position based in our Takapuna office four days a week, with Thursdays from home. You must already hold the right to work in New Zealand; we can't sponsor a visa for this role.

You'll be one of five engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering, and comfortable across the whole stack, from the React Native apps through to Firebase and Google Cloud infrastructure.

You'll play a pivotal role in growing and shaping our product and technology as we continue to scale the platform. This isn't just a coding role. You'll be trusted to make technical decisions, design solutions to real problems, and take ownership of the work from idea through to production.

Three skills matter more to us than anything else: communicating context, assessing risk, and making sound decisions. In a small team moving fast, most mistakes come from someone acting on half the picture, so whether you're briefing a stakeholder, handing a problem to a peer, or setting up an AI agent, you give them what they need to make the right call: what's going on, why it matters, what's been tried, and where the risks are.

We're an AI-first engineering team. Coding agents like Claude Code are part of how we build every day, across delivery, testing, exploration and review, and we're still working out how far that goes. As a senior you won't just use these tools well. You'll help set the bar for how the whole team uses them.

We'd love this hire to bring a DevOps or platform background. You'll work across features and platform like everyone else, and that experience will shape how we build, ship and run the platform.

We level senior engineers as autonomous, driving complex work and elevating the team. That's the bar for this role.

Our stack: TypeScript throughout. React Native with Expo, one codebase for iOS, Android and web. Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Storage, Cloud Functions) on Google Cloud. NestJS. Expo EAS for builds and hosting, GitHub Actions for CI, Sentry for observability, LaunchDarkly for feature flags. GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Slack. Claude Code on the Max plan for every engineer.

What We're Looking For

Must have:

• The right to work in New Zealand

• Agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar) as your daily default, not an occasional helper

• Strong TypeScript, Node.js and React / React Native

• Hands-on ownership of at least one of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability or disaster recovery for a production system. You built it, ran it, and fixed it when it broke

Ideally:

A DevOps or platform background. You've run production infrastructure on a cloud platform: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, backups and recovery. Not a gate, but it's the experience we're most keen to add to the team.

How you work:

These are what we'll dig into at interview. Nobody is equally strong on all of these; tell us which are yours.

• You communicate context efficiently, whether that's an RFC, a Slack thread, a whiteboard session or a prompt to an agent. You give a stakeholder, a peer or an AI agent the situation, the constraints and the goal so they can act well without coming back for more, and you drive discussions to a clear outcome

• You assess risk and make sound decisions. Be ready to walk us through a decision you made on incomplete information: what you knew, what could go wrong, and how you briefed the people or agents who acted on it

• You own everything that ships under your name. AI-generated code gets the same review, testing and scrutiny as hand-written code, and you can explain any line of it

• You know where agents fall down and when to step in, and you have good judgement about when to lean on them and when to write it yourself

• You build leverage for the team: agent instructions, test harnesses, and checks that catch what agents get wrong

• You design systems, not just features. You reason about boundaries, data flow, failure modes, and how a change fits the wider architecture

• You model data well in NoSQL stores like Firestore, and recognise when a relational model fits better

• You break ambiguous problems down and define a clear approach before diving into implementation

• You treat operability as part of done: rollout, rollback, monitoring and runbooks ship with the feature

• You hold a high bar on code quality, with clear contracts, strong typing and thorough self-review, and you put testing effort where it matters most

• You're collaborative and supportive, happy to mentor others and lift the team

Bonus:

• Firebase / Google Cloud Platform experience

• Shipping LLM-powered product features: prompt design, structured outputs, evals, guardrails

• Native iOS or Android development, beyond React Native

• A strong sense for user experience and interface design

• Maritime / seafaring knowledge or experience

A Day on Deck

Your day-to-day will include:

• Building and maintaining our React Native apps and the Node.js, Cloud Functions and NestJS services behind them, and keeping them healthy in production

• Owning features end to end: defining the approach, weighing risks and trade-offs, building, and seeing them through to production

• Strengthening the platform underneath the product: GitHub Actions pipelines, Firebase and GCP environments, infrastructure as code, observability, backups and recovery

• Using coding agents to deliver, test and explore faster while keeping the quality bar exactly where it is, and improving how the team works with them

• Introducing changes incrementally and safely, especially for shared systems and cross-cutting functionality

• Reviewing code, mentoring other engineers, and paying down technical debt as you go

• Working with the Head of Engineering and leadership team to shape technical and product decisions

What We Offer

• Claude Max subscription for every engineer, and the time to get good with it

• Yearly training budget

• Takapuna office close to public transport and cycle lanes, with harbour and city views

• Weekly team morning tea