Principal Engineer, Platform

Description

Build the platform that powers great engineering and great products.
More than two million Kiwis visit stuff.co.nz every month, and the engineering platform underpinning that experience is evolving fast. We're looking for a Principal Engineer to own that evolution: setting the Golden Path, leading our platform team, and building a platform that engineering teams genuinely want to build on.

This isn't a maintenance role. You'll shape platform strategy, drive cloud-native modernisation, and lift operational maturity across the engineering organisation.

Requirements

• Own and evolve our Golden Path for software delivery, from local development to production.
• Drive platform engineering as a product, balancing developer experience, reliability, security and cost efficiency.
• Lead a small platform team: set technical direction, shape the roadmap and grow the team's capability.
• Own our Kubernetes estate on AWS EKS, including cluster lifecycle and upgrades, autoscaling, ingress and traffic management.
• Lead cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code practices using technologies such as Terraform, Kubernetes, Spinnaker and Jenkins.
• Own observability strategy end to end, from OpenTelemetry instrumentation standards through to the tooling teams use to answer their own questions about production.
• Set caching and content delivery strategy, from CDN and edge caching through to in-cluster HTTP caching and ElastiCache.
• Improve resilience and operational excellence, including SLOs, incident response, on-call practice and performance at high traffic volumes.
• Keep the platform secure by default, embedding automated controls, access standards and policy enforcement into engineering workflows.
• Mentor engineers, influence architecture decisions and raise engineering capability across teams.