A large, high-profile New Zealand consumer business is in the midst of a genuine digital transformation, shifting from vendor-led delivery to building stronger, longer-term in-house engineering capability. This is a pivotal hire into a small but mighty senior team that sits at the heart of a high-traffic digital platform used by hundreds of thousands of customers each month.
The opportunity suits a principal level engineer who enjoys being close to the detail, but who also naturally thinks in systems: how standards, patterns, operational discipline and shared capabilities can lift multiple teams at once. You’ll be the kind of technical leader people trust in the messy moments the person who can guide decisions, coach others, and still roll up your sleeves when it matters.
There’s real ownership here: you’ll help keep a mission-critical platform stable and moving forward, while also shaping what “good” looks like as more technology is brought in-house.
Over time, there’s also a strong strategic intent to improve consistency and unify capability across multiple digital products, so this isn’t just a “keep the lights on” role. It’s about strengthening foundations so teams can build faster, safer and with more confidence.
About the Opportunity
You’ll take ownership of the technical direction and ongoing evolution of a platform stack, partnering closely with app/product teams and engineering leaders. Your work will span build, run and improvement:
- Leading technical design and decision-making across a modern services environment, with a strong focus on reliability, performance and maintainability
- Building and evolving backend services in Java and Spring Boot
- Working in an AWS environment and applying cloud-native patterns and pragmatic operational excellence
- Establishing and uplifting engineering standards and reusable patterns that teams actually adopt (not just “documentation that nobody reads”)
- Coaching senior engineers, strengthening capability, and setting a calm, practical tone in delivery and incident situations
- Taking on line management for a small but mighty engineering team (currently 2 engineers, with an additional hire underway)
- Participating in an on-call roster supporting a 24/7 operational platform with a focus on improving stability and reducing repeat issues over time
What You’ll Bring
This role is best suited to someone with strong fundamentals and proven experience operating at scale:
- Very strong Java engineering experience (you’ve built and supported systems that matter)
- Solid commercial experience with Spring Boot in modern, service-based environments
- Strong AWS capability (architecture, deployment patterns, production operations)
- Confidence working in distributed systems and production environments where reliability and performance aren’t optional
- Comfort using modern development productivity tooling, including Claude (AI), to support faster iteration, experimentation and agentic workflows where appropriate
Beyond the tech, this role needs a steady technical leader:
- You communicate clearly and bring people with you, especially when priorities compete.
- You can influence across teams without relying on hierarchy.
- You’re pragmatic: you know when to perfect something and when to make a safe, sensible trade-off.
- You care about lifting others through coaching, strong review habits, and improving how work gets delivered
Next Steps?
To keep things simple, we ask that all applications are submitted through this advert. We’ll review applications as they come in and be in touch.
For any questions give Teresa Jordan a call on +64 27 376 4884 and quote Job ID: 18181 for a confidential chat.
To apply for this vacancy, you MUST be a New Zealand citizen, resident, or have already secured the right to work in New Zealand and therefore hold a valid visa.
At the appropriate stage we will request your references, we ask that you do not include them on your CV when applying.
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