Senior Software Engineer (Fullstack)

Appetise is a meal planning and smart shopping app that 125,000+ Australians and Kiwis use to decide what to cook and get the cheapest groceries across Woolworths, Coles, and beyond. The app is free and will stay free. Behind the scenes, that gives us the largest food and beverage behavioural panel in ANZ, which we sell to 80+ FMCG brands.

We closed a $7M Series A in February 2026, led by Icehouse Ventures. We made the cover of Forbes earlier this year and we're starting to expand beyond Australia and NZ. Engineering sits right in the middle of that, shipping the Shopper app that drives the panel and Appetise Intelligence, the B2B product brands use to make sense of it.

We're around 18 people across Christchurch and Sydney, with an engineering team of 8. The team is low-ego, fast-moving, and genuinely cares about the product and each other. The codebase is small enough that what you ship matters, and you'll see it in customers' hands the same day.

What we offer:

• Salary band of $120k to $160k NZD, depending on experience

• Hybrid working from our Christchurch office. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are our anchor days

• Learning and development you'll actually use. Tell us what you want to learn and we'll back you. Our default answer is yes

• Monday Lunch on us, Treat Tuesdays, and quarterly team days in person

About Our Engineering Team

We're a small team of experienced engineers who love what we do, and there's plenty to learn from the people around you. Engineers here own features end-to-end, ship to production multiple times a day, and get to work across a few different stacks and languages depending on what the problem needs. We're heavy users of Claude Code and keep the ceremony low so we can spend our time on the interesting bits, building good software with people we genuinely like working with.

About the role

We're hiring a Senior Fullstack Engineer to contribute across our B2C consumer Shopper product and Appetise Intelligence (our B2B AI product). You'll own features end-to-end across Laravel and Vue 3, with occasional mobile work in React Native / Expo.

This is a Senior (IC3) role on our engineering ladder. You're accountable for delivery in your area, contribute to roadmap and scoping, raise risks early, and make considered architectural calls with clear tradeoffs.

What you'll do in your first 90 days

• Ship features end-to-end on the Shopper or Appetise Intelligence product, backend and frontend, with minimal direction

• Own at least one roadmap feature as lead engineer, from scoping through deployment and monitoring

• Contribute to design reviews and ADRs

• Pair with the team on at least one mobile (React Native / Expo) touchpoint so we have more depth picking up mobile work

• Earn the trust to make architectural calls in your feature area without escalation

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• Deep fluency in Laravel and Vue 3 with genuine breadth across both ends of the stack

• Independently scopes and implements solutions spanning multiple systems

• Comfortable owning a feature from database schema through to frontend, deployment, and monitoring

• Track record of shipping non-trivial things to production reliably

• Comfortable picking up React Native / Expo when needed

• Claude Code (or equivalent) as a genuine force-multiplier. You structure prompts for consistent output, critically evaluate AI-generated suggestions against the actual codebase, and own what ships regardless of how it was generated

• Operating at a Senior (IC3) level already: accountable for quality and delivery on what you own, contributing to roadmap and scoping for your area, raising risks early, making considered architectural calls

• Thrives in an environment where requirements and scope won't always be handed to them on a plate. Comfortable sitting with ambiguity, asking the right questions, and shaping the work themselves

• Current right to work in New Zealand

What makes someone exceptional here

• Demonstrable AI/LLM product experience. You've built AI-assisted features, not just used AI to write code faster

• Holds your own in architecture conversations without being led

• Has shipped real product in a small team where the engineer / product engineer line is blurry

Nice to have

• Event-driven systems or data-adjacent backend work (our roadmap is heading there: new event pipeline, Shopper Media)

• Multi-tenant SaaS or platforms with both B2B and B2C surfaces

• Mobile experience beyond 'can pick it up'

Background that tends to do well

Senior engineers from product-led startups (50-200 people) who've owned features end-to-end.

Who you are

• Listens before leading. You arrive as a sponge. You don't push 'the way we did it at X'. You earn trust by understanding context first.

• Team-first operator. You've thrived in small teams. Default to collaboration, not lone-wolf delivery.

• Strong communicator with presence. Async-first on Slack, clear WIP updates, brings warmth to the team.

• Respectful of attention and time. Don't interrupt unnecessarily, bring agendas to sync time.

• Steady, reliable ambition. Mission-driven, not status-driven.

• Strategic and operational. In the weeds, head still lifted. Think in systems.

Our process

This role is open until filled and we're looking to move quickly for the right person.

• First call with one of our Tech Team Leads

• Face to face interview with two senior members of our tech team

• Up to a full day onsite in Christchurch working with our team, solving a real problem (we'll pay you for your time)

• A final call with our CEO

Appetise is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of background, identity, or experience level. If you need any accommodations during the application process, let us know.