Senior Software Engineer

Rico is a fast-growing New Zealand startup.

We build tools that help planners and councils prepare and process planning applications (e.g. resource consents) faster and more consistently.

The planning process may not sound sexy - but it’s almost certainly touched your life in some way. Planning processes are the gateway for almost all development in NZ, from housing to infrastructure to farming. The current process is slow, fragmented, and costly, creating plenty of room for us to make a difference.

We're a nimble team, growing fast (8, growing to 10). What you build will have a real impact. The team you’re in will constantly be growing.

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The Role

You’ll be working directly with our CTO.

Our architecture, engineering practices, and development processes are all evolving as we scale. You’ll be a key part of that.

We’re after someone with an eye for detail and who cares deeply about UX and Product - we believe this will best complement our current team’s skillset.

You will love taking ownership of tricky problems, and shipping polished, reliable features quickly.

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)

Unique Engineering Opportunities

• UX challenges: Planning assessments / decisions are a complex, technical domain with a lot of moving parts. Our product needs to be fast, intuitive, flexible, and great to use to keep up.
• 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.
• AI integrations: You'll work on AI integrations across our customer-facing product and internal workflows, helping shape how we adopt and apply new capabilities as the technology evolves.
• Architecture evolution: Helping redesign parts of our system to allow us to scale to more customers, new use cases, and more employees.
• Production grade functional programming: Functional programming with Typescript and Effect for next level type safety and developer experience.

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• Strong frontend or fullstack experience, ideally with React and TypeScript
• Good product instincts - you've worked closely with users or designers and have opinions about what makes software easy to use
• 5+ 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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What We Offer

• A talented, low-ego team where you will learn a lot.
• Autonomy, flexibility, and influence - you have the opportunity to shape our product decisions, technology and culture.
• Competitive salary ($130,000-$160,000 depending on experience).
• Fast feedback loops and real impact: what you build is used by real people within days.