Key Facts

Role: Software Engineer

Levels: Intermediate

Salaries:

NZD $121k

Location: Anywhere in New Zealand

Hours: 37.5 hours a week

Team size: Small, cross-functional product squads

Full Benefits

• We have transparent salaries, which is set globally for all our staff.
• 20 days paid leave with extra leave based on tenure, 20 days sick leave
• Fully remote team across different timezones.
• MacBook Pro Laptop + NZD $3,000 for home office setup
• Health Insurance coverage
• Advance your skills, learn new techniques, and be surrounded by a talented and supportive team.
• Thrive as you help us build a high-growth company to improve the work lives of thousands of people.

Our Technology & Attitude

‍‍Runn is built using a modern development stack: React, Node, GraphQL, Postgres tested with Cypress and Vitest, deployed via Github Actions, hosted on Heroku.

Our developers are involved in the entire product life cycle. We aren't just full stack, we are product stack. That means you'll be involved from the idea stage, into design, then development, testing, deployment and support. You need to be passionate about what you are building, and the technology you can employ to build it.

Who are we looking for?

You’re an intermediate engineer who can deliver high-quality product work, communicate clearly, and make good trade-offs. You enjoy collaborating with product and design, and you care about maintainability, performance, and user experience.

We recognise that soft skills are just as important as intricate technical knowledge and we try to build our team with a mix of both. We want people who are willing to empathise with our customers and give them the best experience. If you feel limited at your current job, we want to talk to you.

Because we are a remote company, communication is a vital skill. We prefer people that over-communicate and are willing to respond quickly. So much of what we do is over Slack and we want to see your personality come through when you write.

If you're someone who excels at producing high-quality work and is dedicated to delivering positive outcomes for customers, you'll fit right in with our team. We believe in setting high standards for ourselves and we're always looking for ways to improve and grow.

We’re open to different backgrounds, but you should be able to succeed with the responsibilities below.

Key responsibilities

1. Build and ship customer-facing product experiences. Deliver polished React + TypeScript features, collaborate on API needs, and ensure changes are reliable, accessible, and performant.
2. Own work end-to-end. Take ownership from discovery and technical design through implementation, testing, release, and iteration.
3. Contribute across the stack. Work with GraphQL services and Postgres-backed systems, understand data flows, and help improve API design and backend implementation as needed.
4. Raise engineering quality. Improve patterns, reduce tech debt, strengthen testing, and contribute to a healthy codebase through reviews and thoughtful refactoring.
5. Collaborate and communicate in a remote team. Work effectively async, write clear updates, and partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to deliver outcomes.
6. Support the team through mentoring and feedback. Help other engineers level up through pairing, reviews, and sharing context and best practices.

Key challenges

• Balancing speed and quality while building in a small team
• Making good trade-offs under ambiguity and changing customer needs
• Collaborating effectively across time zones in an async environment
• Keeping the bar high on code quality, testing, and maintainability as we scale

Must have

• Strong experience building production web applications with React and TypeScript
• Solid fundamentals in modern frontend engineering (state management, performance, accessibility, testing)
• Experience working with APIs (preferably GraphQL) and relational databases (preferably Postgres)
• Comfort owning work end-to-end and shipping iteratively
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in a remote setting
• High standards for code quality, testing, and maintainable systems

Nice to have

• Experience with Node.js backend development
• Experience with Cypress and/or Vitest
• Familiarity with CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar)
• Experience with observability and product analytics (logging, metrics, Mixpanel, etc.)
• Experience working in Shape Up (or similar) delivery cycles

Attitude

• Curious and eager to learn
• Pragmatic: biased toward action and shipping value
• Empathetic and collaborative: you raise the team, not just the code
• Thoughtful about trade-offs and able to explain decisions clearly
• Comfortable with ownership and accountability

What’s it like working at Runn?

Runn follows the Shape Up methodology with some modifications that work better for our team.

You’ll work in 8 week cycles, that includes 6 weeks of project work, followed by 2 weeks of self-directed cooldown time. Before each cycle starts, the upcoming work is shared with the engineering team, and engineers can put their hand up to work on projects.

Each project team is made up of 3 people. 2 engineers and one 1 product designer, with the explicit goal of having a releasable feature at the end of the 6 week cycle.

We currently have 3 streams of work each cycle:

• 2 product streams which work on significant new product features or improvements
• 1 rapid response / support stream which focuses on any customer issues an bug fixes.

Our entire team is async, and you may work with someone who has a 12hr time different with you. It’s up to each team to decide the best way to communicate, whether that’s fully async, or if they occasionally have scheduled calls to discuss ongoing work. Flexibility is key.

At the start of each cycle, teams commit to delivering features to a scope they decide. This scope should be a useful and releasable feature that customers can use without any additional work required. This requires being ruthless and focused on what provides value and what is nice to have.

Transparent Salaries

Runn has a transparent and equal pay policy, which means that all employees in the same role and level receive the same starting compensation regardless of location. We do not negotiate individual salaries. We additionally pay people more the longer they stay at Runn. This policy ensures that all employees are treated fairly and equitably. Your final compensation will depend on your local tax laws.

What does Runn actually do?

Runn’s vision is “a world where neither time nor talent is wasted”.

Runn empowers leaders to run dynamic and impactful organizations

Through real-time workforce management, we unleash talent within organizations and their broader networks. By aligning each person’s capabilities, capacity, and interests with the specific needs of every initiative, we help build teams that are not only the right fit but also highly engaged and effective at achieving great outcomes.

Our current primary product provides a project and resource management platform for large organisations to manage their upcoming projects and workforce. We have a commitment to putting people first in our product, with a focus on creating well planned projects that bring the right team of people together to deliver projects on time while looking after the the team’s time.

We have a strong focus on user experience and design, and keep true to our values of Beauty, Excellent, Adventure and Transparency.

We of course use Runn internally with our team of ~50, while also having fortune 100 companies with thousands of staff being managed and planned in Runn.

Hiring Process

Roles at Runn are highly competitive with many applications applying for few roles.

When applying you must include a cover letter/email, this must include the level you are applying for, your experience and an example of something software related you’ve done and are proud off.

Any applications that do not include the above or are generated by AI will be rejected with an automated message.

At Runn, we value your time just as much as our own. This is why we always ensure during our process you are spending 1-on-1 time with one of our team.

Interview Process

Our interview process is at follows, we'll filter candidates at each of these steps:

• Review of cover letter and resume
• 5 minutes self-recorded video
• 45 minutes You interview us
  • You ask us questions about anything
  • We rate your communication, engagement and enquiry skills
  • Asking good questions is critical to find the right solution
• 60 minutes technical interview
  • We’ll ask you to share in detail an achievement you are proud of
  • We’ll ask you a series of engineering related questions. These are general software engineering questions rather than specific code-related questions
• 30 minute technical interview
  • We’ll ask you about your relevant experience
  • Better chance to see how you might fit into the team

Completing a deep interview process, often when many applicants, means we aren’t able to provide a definitive timeline. You should receive an initial response within 2 weeks, and the entire process can generally takes anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks. We do understand you may have other roles you are applying for, or other commitments, so please let us know of any timeline you have and we’ll try to accomodate this.

Diversity and Inclusion

Runn believes that diversity and inclusion is important to running a successful business. We see differences in people and background as an asset to our organisation and are always looking for people who have different ideas and challenge our opinions.

Runn overall team is ~53% non-male, including 50% of our leadership team and CEO. Our engineering team is 25% non-male. We come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and have our own individual and diverse set of needs that Runn supports.

We encourage anyone from under-represented groups to apply, and we'll make our best effort to support your application process, including providing any special requirements and support you may need.