Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

Flicket is an event commerce platform that unifies ticketing, payments, marketing, customer data and event delivery into one white-label solution. Founded in 2018 in the Bay of Plenty, we now sell more than five million tickets a year for sports, festivals, exhibitions and live events across New Zealand, Australia, North America and the UK. Last year we grew tickets sold by 75% and placed third in the Deloitte Fast 50. International is now our growth engine. Our strategy is simple: hustle, and six-star service. We move faster than incumbents ten to a hundred times our size, and we care more. When a whole country hits the queue at once, we do not blink.

The role

Our engineering team has shipped hard: we deploy to production more than ten times a day, throughput roughly doubled in a year as AI-native delivery ramped, and the platform held through record growth. We have now hit the ceiling of how we work today, and we need a leader to take the reins.

You will own how engineering delivers, who does the work, and that it ships. The CTO owns what we build and why. You build an engineering function that drives and rewards delivery, then you grow it. Your first new team will be a dedicated payments squad, with more headcount to follow as our structural bets land.

What you'll own

Delivery: turn the product roadmap into sequenced, staffed work with order-of-magnitude sizes the business can plan against, and a fast, safe path to production (risk-tiered review, CI under five minutes, automated quality gates).

Reliability: on-sale readiness, capacity planning, load testing, queueing and monitoring, so a 25,000-capacity event sells out with zero checkout errors.

Engineering operations: end-to-end incident management, on-call, and a single intake for client requests with a named triage owner, so teams stay focused.

The structural bets: payments (Stripe Connect and merchant of record), cart and checkout rebuilt for conversion, reserved seating, point of sale, memberships, resale and AI reporting.

Security and compliance: run our SOC 2 programme as an execution track with milestones.

AI-native engineering: around half our commits are AI-assisted today. You make that safe, measured and faster, and keep review, CI/CD and QA tooled for agent speed.

People: lead a senior, fully remote team with clear expectations and honest performance conversations, run our levels framework, own hiring end-to-end, and stand up the payments team.

Visibility: a monthly engineering report a non-technical founder can read, covering what shipped, what it cost, and planned versus reactive work.

Budget: engineering spend and vendors, kept in line with growth.

What you bring

You have led an engineering team of eight or more at a product company moving at pace, and you have grown one: hired, onboarded and structured new teams while keeping delivery up.

A track record of shipping. You can point to delivery you owned, with the numbers.

Experience running production systems under real load, with incidents and on-call. Payments, commerce or ticketing experience is a plus.

Hands-on enough to review architecture, read a postmortem critically, and unblock a stuck team without needing to write the code.

Fluent in AI-assisted delivery with tools like Claude Code, and clear on how to make it safe and fast.

Comfortable with SOC 2 or an equivalent security programme, or a clear view of how you would run one.

You can give an order-of-magnitude answer on a vague idea, and explain to a non-technical founder what engineering shipped last month and what it cost.

Who you are

You own outcomes: when something breaks, your hand goes up first, and the fix comes with it. You move with incomplete information and de-risk as you go. You bring options, not conditions, and you would rather ship something this week than propose it next quarter. You get speed and safety through engineering, not by slowing people down. You say the hard thing directly. And you know the on-sale minute is the moment the customer judges us.

What we offer

A senior leadership seat in a profitable, fast-growing global business, reporting to the CTO.

Competitive package, flexible for the right person.

Auckland-based, with a remote team across New Zealand and regular in-person time together.

Real problems at real scale: payments, on-sale load, four markets, and an AI-native way of building that most teams are still talking about.

* A culture that lives our values: Be Direct, Create Raving Fans, Control the Controllables, No Job Too Small, We Are a Winning Team, We Live Live.

How to apply

Apply through Seek with your CV and a short note on the delivery you are proudest of and what the numbers were. We read every application and reply to everyone.

Applicants must have the right to work in New Zealand.