Principal Engineer

At Realrun, we are building the routing and logistics engine that maps offline distribution into a real-time digital network, turning massive streams of concurrent geospatial events into verifiable proof-of-work. With over 2000+ businesses on board, our product has serious traction. Now, the systems need to scale. We need a pragmatic Engineering Lead to own our technical direction -architecting, shipping, and eventually leading a high-density team. We aren’t looking for a total rewrite. Your immediate mission is to audit our architecture, resolve compute and database bottlenecks, and drastically improve system performance (Big O) and app latency. Once our core compute handles this next order of magnitude, we will shift focus toward AI integration.

What you will do

• Pragmatic Systems Design: Evaluate our current backend and pragmatically evolve our architecture to support hyper-growth, ensuring we can efficiently process high-throughput spatial data.
• Performance Engineering: Radically improve compute speed across our stack. Track down bottlenecks and turn sluggish O(n²) constraints into elegant, highly efficient solutions.
• App Optimisation: Strip out latency and make our React Native app blisteringly fast, resilient, and reliable for thousands of concurrent field sessions.
• Geospatial ML: Build the pipelines and machine learning models required to extract routing intelligence and predictive insights from our raw PostGIS data.
• AI Integration: Once our core systems are highly optimised, lead the integration of AI capabilities into our product and internal tooling.
• Lead by Doing: Set an uncompromising technical bar, write high-leverage code, and unblock the engineering team.

Who we are looking for

• Experience: 5 – 10 years of engineering rigour, with a degree in CS, SWE, or ML. You have been instrumental in scaling complex systems at a top-tier tech company or a fast-growing startup.
• Technical Depth: Expert-level understanding of React Native, modern JS/TS, Postgres, and serverless/edge functions.
• Algorithmic Focus: You care deeply about system performance, database query optimisation, and compute efficiency. You don’t just write code that works; you write code that scales.
• Domain Expertise: A deep, genuine interest in spatial data, mapping, and PostGIS.
• High Agency & Ownership Mindset: You take extreme ownership. You thrive in unstructured environments, embrace hard constraints, and know how to balance shipping features with paying down technical debt.

Our stack React, React Native (Expo), Supabase, Postgres + PostGIS, AWS, Vercel, Sentry. Compensation & Culture

• Total Comp ($180k – $250k) & Path to CTO: We aren’t just hiring a lead; we are looking for our future CTO, part-owner, and board member. We are structuring the equity (ESOP) for this role aggressively: deliver exceptional performance and results, and your trajectory within the company will be exponential. You will have a lopsided opportunity to secure a true founding seat at the table. We want an owner, not a renter.
• Location (Neutral Bay): Fully in-office. We believe the hardest technical problems are solved fastest when high-calibre teams sit together.