Lead 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
Ship fast, ship safe, and help your squad level up
You'll lead technical decision-making for your squad at Southern Cross Health Insurance, turning customer needs into working software that delivers value. This is a hands-on role: you'll write code, review pull requests, shape architecture, and make the hard technical trade-offs that keep delivery moving.

What You'll Do
You'll own the engineering quality and flow for your squad: ship small, frequent changes with short lead times and high confidence. Services are observable, operable, and rarely on fire. CI/CD stays green and fast. Technical debt is visible, prioritised, and shrinking. When incidents happen, you turn learnings into code and process improvements, not just postmortems.

You'll work across the stack designing solutions that are clean, testable, and reusable beyond your squad. You'll default to golden paths and platform patterns, but when you need to diverge, you'll make it explicit, time-boxed, and feed improvements back to the wider engineering community.

You'll own the technical health of your product. Technical debt and key risks are visible, prioritised, and actively managed. Health improves without jeopardising delivery. You'll make sure the right technical work is in the backlog and advocate for improvements that matter, not firefighting or gold plating.

You'll be a constructive partner, not a gatekeeper, by guiding progress through partnership. You'll align with your Squad Lead, Product Owner, Principal Engineer, Platform, and Architecture teams to balance speed, quality, and reliability. You'll surface risks early, make trade-offs transparent, and help the team run experiments that inform product decisions.

Growing the squad
You'll coach developers and testers through pairing, reviews, and knowledge-sharing. You'll raise the bar for the whole squad growing their autonomy, technical judgment, and craft. You'll encourage responsible usage of AI to speed development. You'll capture what you learn and share it across communities of practice.

What You'll Need

• Technical depth: Deep experience with: ASP.NET, React, Angular, NodeJS, JavaScript / TypeScript, .NET, .NET Core, Git, Azure, ADO, Docker, Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform . Strong software design skills with confidence across both service and UI boundaries. You know how to design for diagnosability and operability from the start.
• Testing & automation: Robust test design across unit, contract, API, and component layers. You understand minimal, meaningful E2E testing and have practical environment expertise including ephemeral environments.
• Pipelines & platforms: Skilled in CI/CD pipeline optimization, build systems, artifact management, and driving down flake rates. Practical cloud and platform knowledge—you use golden paths and avoid bespoke solutions.
• Security & reliability: Solid understanding of secure coding, dependency management, secrets handling, and least privilege. You design observable systems with meaningful SLOs, alerts, and runbooks.
• Delivery & collaboration: Clear communicator who works effectively in cross-functional teams. Strong at iterative delivery, story slicing, estimation, and surfacing risk early. You guide progress through partnership, not gatekeeping.
• Culture: Curious, open to feedback, and you make it safe for others to challenge assumptions.

Our values who we are and what's important to us.

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