Engineering Lead

Mission

Build the future of hiring with AI.
At OfferZen, we’re building an AI-driven tech assessment platform that helps companies hire great engineers - faster and fairer. As Engineering Lead, you’ll be hands-on in designing and scaling our assessments platform (stack: React/JavaScript and LangGraph), where AI generates and evaluates coding challenges and tech interviews. You’ll tackle hard problems like making AI judgments reliable, turning unstructured data into trusted insights, and creating systems that scale this function. 

You’ll also get the autonomy to shape the product: discovering opportunities, shipping fast, and iterating based on real-world feedback. You will be building systems that deeply influence how the best engineers get hired. If you’re excited by solving complex engineering problems, passionate about AI, and looking for a role where you can both architect systems and define product direction, we’d love to talk.

What success in this role looks like:

• Technical vetting is delivered reliably, on time and with consistently high quality, even as processes and tools evolve.
• The candidate experience is professional, respectful, and provides meaningful feedback at all stages.
• Companies trust the vetting process and consistently provide positive feedback on candidate quality.
• The platform and operational processes mature together, resulting in measurable improvements in turnaround time, load capacity, and quality indicators.
• A network of trained freelance reviewers/interviewers are sourced, onboarded, coordinated, and supported effectively, reducing the need for direct hands-on vetting work over time.
• The MVP evolves into a robust, adaptable, and competitive offering that can respond quickly to industry shifts and client needs.

Responsibilities:

• Own the assessments product: discovery, roadmap, delivery and outcomes.
• Contribute to vetting work (assignment reviews, interviews, summaries) during the early stages, with the goal of transitioning this workload to freelancers over time.
• Hands-on development of a tech vetting platform for efficient technical assessments at scale, leveraging an AI-driven agentic system.
• Define how feedback is packaged for customers; make insights decision-ready.
• Shape the strategic direction of technical vetting, guiding its evolution from MVP to a mature, scalable offering.
• Work closely with the operations team to ensure they can effectively source, onboard and manage freelance interviewees, while you focus on building the systems and tools that make this scalable. You will review CVs and interview freelancers, and the operations team will take care of interview scheduling and communication with the freelancer group. Partner with operational team members to source and manage freelance interviewers, and to oversee training, scheduling and quality assurance.
• Shape and iterate on tech vetting processes, SLAs, and operational structures to improve speed, quality and scalability.

Role-specific competencies:

• Product-minded engineering: understands users and business context, shapes the problem, ships small bets, measures outcomes and iterates
• AI production chops: prompt and tool orchestration, eval harnesses, guardrails, cost/perf tuning
• Hands-on technical skill: able to meaningfully contribute to the platform's codebase
• Leadership & autonomy: self-starter, comfortable wearing multiple hats, excellent communication skills
• Systems thinker: designs ops that scale, automates the boring stuff
• Technical breadth: confident validating assessments across common backend/frontend stacks
• Startup mindset: comfortable with ambiguity, ships value weekly, communicates crisply
• Operational coordination: manages quality control and freelancer network performance in partnership with operational support

Background:

• 8+ years of experience in software development (Python preferred)
• Experience in AI Agent Framework
• Built production LLM features; shipped agentic workflows
• Significant experience conducting technical interviews and reviewing code assignments
• Startup or high-growth environment experience strongly preferred
• Experience in leading or managing teams

What it's like to work here

We love to do fun stuff together. We are focused on building a connected tribe and a sense of belonging. We value unique and diverse approaches and ensure we create opportunities to share and learn from each other. We have regular online events, show and tells and a book club as well as regional and annual off-site events.

We're dedicated to authenticity: We treat people as people, caring personally and speaking openly. We foster low-ego behaviour - we own our mistakes as well as our victories. We're never about blame. We're always about honesty, learning and continuous improvement. We ensure lots of transparency and visibility. From OKRs and strategy to analytics and company performance numbers, it's all available for you to see and understand.

We're passionate about learning and levelling up: Everyone at OfferZen strives for a growth mindset. We read books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for the learning and how to improve.

We’re all about balance: We believe that maintaining a healthy balance between home and work is the key to feeling happier and more productive. We work fully remote and also offer 24 days of leave a year which are available to use from the time you start. 

The OfferZen Story

OfferZen is on a mission to improve the experience of finding work for people involved in making software, from developers to designers and data scientists through the utilisation of our world class online recruitment marketplace. We do this by flipping the traditional recruitment model on its head and getting companies to reach out to candidates with upfront offers.

Over the last 10 years, we have managed to make a large dent in the South African online tech recruitment marketplace - and we're speeding up. One in five developers in South Africa will use OfferZen to look for a job each year, and we're on a mission to elevate local talent on the global stage.  

*This role can be based locally or remotely - we welcome all applicants based in South Africa.