Practice Principal Engineer

About Us
We're a not-for-profit organisation on a mission to transform ourselves and empower New Zealanders to live their healthiest lives.

With almost a million members in our care, we are New Zealand's leading health insurer.

We have an unstoppable focus, delivering outstanding experiences to our members in their time of need. This is an exciting time to be part of our journey and in return for your extraordinary talent, we'll provide a high performing values-based team environment where people are at our heart.

About The Role
As one of our
Practice Principal Engineers
you will drive engineering excellence and uplift software delivery maturity. You'll be championing modern software development practices and fostering a culture of secure, simple, and scalable delivery. Partnering with squads, platform teams, and value streams to embed consistent engineering standards, improve flow, and reduce risk, ensuring we can deliver operable software at scale with confidence and speed.

As a key leader in our Engineering Practice, you'll enable teams to adopt strong CI/CD practices, improve system reliability, and enhance release cadence while reducing change failure rates. You'll align engineering outcomes across functions through shared OKRs, remove systemic friction, and strengthen our engineering culture through mentorship, clear accountabilities, and the creation of reusable knowledge assets.

About You

• Proven track record (10+ years) in software engineering, with deep technical expertise across modern software architecture, development practices, quality principles and tooling
• Demonstrated experience leading uplift of engineering maturity across multiple teams or business units
• Skilled communicator who can translate engineering standards into real-world practices
• Experience mentoring engineers and facilitating learning in a federated engineering environment
• Comfortable challenging norms, resolving ambiguity, and influencing without formal authority
• Familiarity with cloud-native systems and enterprise-scale development environments
• Experience standing up or leading CoPs or Centres of Excellence in complex, federated environments
• Familiarity with deployment pipelines and tooling governance in Azure DevOps, GitHub, or equivalent platforms
• Strong understanding of how to bridge architecture, platform enablement, and delivery execution in large enterprise systems
• Ability to influence through communication to drive clarity and alignment across reporting lines and product boundaries, with a track record of navigating ambiguity in matrixed organisations

Ngākau nui.

Āhurutanga.

Tikanga.

Join a proud diverse team, that's
always there, always real, always true
. If you thrive in a caring, honest and open culture, we think you'll love working with us.

We know that it is our team's culture and wellbeing that will drive us forward. That's why we prioritise not only professional development opportunities but opportunities to thrive personally, too. We offer exceptional work/life balance and our employees are encouraged to – and rewarded for – living well.

Southern Cross employee benefits include:

• five days of wellbeing leave per year
• health insurance for you and your immediate whānau
• life insurance cover and discounts on pet and travel insurance
• extra parental leave benefits and financial wellbeing support
• participate in our workplace wellbeing programme.

That's not all. Need more time to study, volunteer or support your whānau? You'll have the opportunity to purchase flexi leave. Each year, you will also get to take part in a volunteer day, to contribute to a cause or community with your team.

Our commitment to LGBTQIA+ and minority communities is reflected in our culture, and we run a regular Diversity and Inclusion Forum to help ensure this continues to flourish.

If you share our commitment and passion, then apply now