Principal Engineer

13 hours ago


Auckland CBD, New Zealand Evolve Recruitment Group Full time
  • Principal Engineer role raises standards across different teams
  • Iconic NZ brand with new leadership striving for ambitious change
  • Additional annual leave, hybrid working, fantastic work life balance

Drive engineering excellence. Shape the future of product and platform delivery.

Are you a seasoned engineering leader who loves enabling others, shaping technical direction, and lifting capability across squads? Do you thrive where modern engineering, great people, and meaningful outcomes meet? If so, this role gives you the scope, influence, and challenge you're looking for.

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to elevate delivery outcomes, strengthen engineering practices, and guide modernisation across an entire Value Stream. You'll partner closely with engineering, quality, architecture, platform, and product leaders to create the conditions where teams can ship fast, safely, and sustainably.

This is a hands-on influence role. Not managing people but growing them.

Why this role matters

As a Principal Engineer, you're the technical North Star across multiple squads. You will:

  • Improve delivery flow and speed through pragmatic engineering practices.
  • Strengthen engineering capability with structured coaching for Lead Engineers and Squad Leads.
  • Embed consistent architecture, standards, and reusable patterns across teams.
  • Lift technical health, reliability, observability, and security across systems.
  • Shape modernisation strategies that make development easier, faster, and more enjoyable.

If you love balancing quality with velocity — and you believe great engineering comes from enabling people, not gatekeeping — you'll feel right at home here.

What you'll lead & influence

  • Fast, predictable delivery: Helping squads ship frequently and confidently with low risk.
  • Engineering uplift: Growing technical decision-makers who can solve problems independently within clear guardrails.
  • Consistency at scale: Ensuring architecture, standards, and patterns are adopted while allowing thoughtful evolution.
  • Technical health: Reducing maintenance burden, improving observability, and ensuring secure-by-default practices.
  • Partnership: Working side-by-side with a Principal Quality Engineer to lift delivery, reliability, and capability across the stream.

What you bring

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including Senior/Lead level influence.
  • Strong technical depth in one or more areas such as architecture, developer experience, reliability, or platform engineering.
  • Experience uplifting engineering practices across multiple squads or domains.
  • Strong coding and review capability in modern stacks (e.g., .NET, React, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#).
  • A deep understanding of CI/CD, cloud-native design, distributed systems, and secure engineering.
  • A coaching-first leadership style — helping others take stronger ownership and make better decisions.
  • Ability to navigate multiple stakeholders and translate between technical and executive conversations.

  • Modern architecture (microservices, DDD, event-driven systems)

  • Cloud optimisation and platform engineering - Azure ideally

This role offers hybrid working with 2-3days in office/WFH. You must be based in Auckland.

All applications are confidential.

Apply now with your CV or alternatively contact Laura Douglas -


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