Expression of Interest - Intermediate to Senior Founding Engineers

Expression of Interest - Intermediate to Senior Founding Engineers

Seeking expressions of interest from intermediate to senior software engineers with 3-7+ years' experience.

If you've been waiting for the right startup to jump into as a member of the founding engineering team, this might be great timing.

About Comply Copilot (Coco AI)

Land developers, planning consultants and councils waste weeks on consenting paperwork that should take days. We're building an AI-native workspace that automates document processing, compliance checks, report generation and the end-to-end planner workflow, so they can focus on the work that actually matters.

We're VC-backed and hybrid-working, and we're looking to expand our founding engineering team to build AI-powered workflows in the gov-tech ecosystem. You'll work directly with the founders, ship to real users weekly, and own outcomes end to end.

The Role

As a software engineer focused on AI automation, you'll:

• Build intelligent automation workflows: design and ship systems that use LLMs to process emails, documents and forms, extracting data, validating compliance and triggering downstream actions
• Own LLM integrations end to end: work with OpenAI, Anthropic and similar APIs to build production features, including prompt engineering, RAG pipelines and vector search
• Ship user-facing AI features: deploy workflow automation tools to planning consultants and councils, gather feedback, and iterate on real-world usage
• Work directly with founders: translate ambiguous user problems into simple, high-impact product decisions without needing a product manager
• Contribute to technical foundations: help establish patterns for data models, API design and AI system architecture as the team grows

Tech stack

• Database: Postgres
• Backend: Python (FastAPI)
• Frontend: React (Tanstack)

What you'll need

• You've taken LLM systems from prototype into production and kept them healthy there, with eval suites, regression testing, tracing and monitoring, plus a real handle on latency, cost and failure modes at scale
• You've automated real work end to end, not just shipped AI features: breaking down a manual process, judging what a model can safely own versus where a human stays in the loop, and proving the result against the baseline it replaced
• Depth with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or similar: RAG and vector databases, retrieval quality, prompt and context engineering, agentic or multi-step workflows
• Strong full-stack fundamentals to back it up: REST API design in Python, React with TanStack
• Seniority to make architecture calls on your own, defend them, and change your mind when the evidence says so
• The legal right to work in New Zealand

What's in it for you

• Remuneration and ESOP package circa NZ$125-200K. We want our team operating like owners, so you share in the equity upside
• An environment where your ideas genuinely change the direction of the product
• Early-stage ownership on something with real impact
• 20 days annual leave and a $2k annual learning budget

How we work

You'll thrive if you:

• Own outcomes. You operate like a founder, not a contractor. You care about what gets delivered and whether it works for users, not just about closing tickets.
• Think in systems. You strategise the big picture, break it into shippable pieces, deploy the first version, and iterate on what you learn from users every week.
• Ship fast. We deploy multiple times a day. No 6-month waterfalls, no endless planning docs. Build small, ship fast, learn, repeat.
• Communicate openly. You over-communicate rather than under-communicate, and you're comfortable with ambiguity, high autonomy and low ego.

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Also hiring: Intermediate Full-Stack Engineer

Same stack, same team, same room as the founders.

We're after 3 to 5 years of solid full-stack experience across Python, React and Postgres.

AI experience is a bonus rather than a requirement, and you'll pick up plenty of it working alongside our senior engineers.

rem package circa $80-125K

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Sound like you?

Skip the cover letter. Send us a one-page CV with your most recent places of work, job title, duration, and what you shipped that mattered (1-2 lines max).

Example:

Xero, Software Engineer, 2 years

• Built the invoice reconciliation engine used by 50k businesses. Reduced processing time by 80% and cut support tickets by 40%.

Parnell, Auckland. Hybrid, 2 days a week in office.