Founding Technical Lead

BetterLabs is a Perth-based Venture Studio and venture fund, backed by RAC and built to turn ambitious ideas into scalable businesses.

The Venture Studio brings together entrepreneurs, product leaders and technologists to build new ventures from the ground up, combining the speed, autonomy and ownership of a startup with the backing, capability and reach of an established organisation.

For this venture, that means you won't be starting with just an idea. You'll have experienced venture-builders around you, an established prototype and customer research, funding, and access to an existing member network numbering in the millions, while still having genuine freedom to shape what the technology, product and venture become.

Help shape an early-stage venture with significant institutional backing that tackles a meaningful road-safety challenge.

• Nine months of customer research have already been completed.
• A mobile app has been designed, built and released to generate early insights.
• 12-month funding pipeline and access to a potential user base numbering in the millions are already in place.

This role goes far beyond a typical Technical Lead position. You'll have genuine ownership of the technology, from architecture through to code, working side by side with a Founding Product Lead as part of the core team.

You'll need to be equally comfortable thinking about how the technology could scale in the future and opening your laptop to build what's needed today.

What you'll be responsible for...

• Own the technical vision, architecture and engineering direction of the product.
• Assess the existing prototype and determine what should be retained, evolved or rebuilt for the next stage.
• Remain deeply hands-on, designing, developing and shipping production software.
• Make pragmatic technology and architecture decisions based on speed, scalability, maintainability and user needs.
• Work closely with the Founding Product Lead to take ideas from concept and prototype through to production.
• Establish lightweight engineering practices that enable rapid experimentation without compromising security or quality.
• Shape the full-stack technology approach across the mobile experience, backend, cloud infrastructure, APIs and data.
• Use modern development tools, including AI-assisted development, where they genuinely accelerate delivery and learning.
• Bring in and technically lead specialist engineers, UX/UI designers, and contractors when additional capabilities are needed.
• Prepare the platform for broader integration, including cybersecurity, privacy, data and compliance requirements.
• Influence senior stakeholders across the Venture Studio and participating interstate organisations.
• Design with future growth in mind, without over-engineering for scale before it is needed.
• Help establish the venture's engineering culture, ways of working and technical decision-making principles from day one.

What you'll bring to the role...

• Your experience as a Technical Lead, Lead Software Engineer, Engineering Lead, Founding Engineer or similar, building digital products in a startup, scale-up, venture or similarly fast-moving environment
• Your strong hands-on full-stack software engineering capability and track record of personally shipping production software
• Your experience working across modern frontend, backend, APIs, databases and cloud infrastructure, with technologies such as React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Azure or GCP
• Your experience designing software architecture while remaining close to implementation and code
• Your ability to move quickly from idea or prototype to working software, learning and iterating as you go
• Your experience building consumer-facing, mobile or high-adoption digital products
• Your ability to make pragmatic technology choices without introducing unnecessary complexity
• Your confidence in using modern engineering and AI-assisted development tools to increase delivery speed
• Your practical understanding of cybersecurity, privacy, automated testing, CI/CD and production engineering
• Your ability to think strategically about future scale while remaining highly hands-on today
• Your confidence working alongside product and UX/UI rather than treating technology as separate from the customer experience
• Your ability to lead engineers and specialist contractors while retaining ownership of technical quality and architecture
• Your strong communication skills and confidence in explaining technical decisions to senior and non-technical stakeholders

The technology

The technology stack hasn't been predetermined, and choosing the right approach will be part of your remit.

We're looking for someone with strong experience across modern full-stack and cloud-native development. You're likely to have worked with technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, React Native or Flutter, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, REST or GraphQL APIs, and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP, alongside modern practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, containerisation and serverless development.

You don't need experience with every technology listed. What matters more is your ability to assess the problem, make pragmatic technology choices and build a secure, maintainable product that can evolve as the venture scales.

Startup experience

If you've founded a technology business, joined a startup at an early stage, or helped build a zero-to-one product from the ground up, your experience will be especially valuable. We want people who understand the trade-offs involved in building quickly, including what didn't work, what they learned and what they would do differently next time.

This is a great role for someone who still loves building software but wants ownership beyond the code: the freedom to shape the architecture, engineering culture and technical foundations of a venture from the beginning.

The priority is to build the right product quickly, safely and in a way people genuinely want to use. As the venture develops, there is also potential to explore more sophisticated capabilities across areas such as AI, vehicle data and other technology-enabled road-safety experiences.

The engagement is an initial 12-month fixed-term based in Perth, with hybrid flexibility and some interstate travel. While the future beyond the funded period is open, the ambition for the initiative is significant, with interest from new markets and the potential for the role to grow into broader technology leadership as it scales.

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Contact the Valrose team for a confidential discussion about the role, environment and selection process.

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