Lead Cloud Engineer

At Trade Me, we're about connecting Kiwi to create the life they want.
Whether it's the big things like finding a home, a job, a car or growing their
business, or the smaller things, like finding that right bedside table or parting
ways with some old stuff. At Trade Me our vision is to be the place where Kiwi
look first.

As a Lead Cloud Engineer within our Cloud Platforms Team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical and strategic direction of our Cloud usage and continuously innovate to deliver and maintain a seamless technology experience. As the technical leader of the team, you will collaborate closely with the Product and Platform Owners to provide a highly self-service, extensible and secure infrastructure product set for our engineers to build upon, assuring the success of critical initiatives and achievement of Trade Me's strategic objectives. Furthermore, you will work closely with Engineering Managers to formulate and champion the adoption of Cloud engineering best practices. Your leadership, technical expertise, and commitment to engineering excellence will be instrumental in ensuring your team's success. 

You will exemplify the qualities of a good engineer and will be expected to instill in others these same qualities – through training, mentoring, and generally being available for advice / help. Most importantly, you will build and promote the culture of trust and cooperation between people across the team and organisation to improve team effectiveness and happiness.

 

Here is what you can expect from this role:

• Assume the mantle of technical leadership and ownership within the Cloud Platform team, advocate for the enablement and success of strategic initiatives, ensuring that the team's solutions align with the overarching technical vision and objectives.
• Work with relevant Principal Cloud Engineers to articulate complex technical and architectural designs, and to develop and implement a technical roadmap for our Cloud infrastructure.
• Lead the advocacy and implementation of engineering best practices across the Cloud Platforms team. This includes coding standards, design principles, testing methodologies, and development workflows.
• Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to ensure effective adoption of  the products and self-service capabilities  developed by the Cloud Platforms team, along with adherence to the guardrails and guidelines defined by the Cloud Platforms team.
• Work with Technical Product Owners during discovery phases to help with feasibility, capacity, and risk management of the Technology roadmap. 
• Advocate for continuous delivery and observability practices across teams. 
• Own the engineering metrics of your team and advocate for data-informed improvements
• Contribute to Trade Me's light-weight governance process by drafting and implementing Guardrails, Guidelines, ADRs, and Tech Radar.
• Work closely with other technology leaders to improve the overall Technology experience. 
• Liaise with your Engineering Manager to support and mentor engineers in their career progression journey, offer objective feedback for their skill level assessment.
• Collaborate with your Engineering Manager during the recruitment process and evaluate candidates by assessing their technical capabilities. 
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and craftsmanship
• Embed within software delivery teams to articulate, plan, develop, test, and release complex solutions.
• Articulate the technical details and opportunity canvases for complex and pan-organisation technical roadmaps.
• Actively advocate and drive Technical Debt management within your immediate squad and organisation and work with the Technical Product Owner to prioritise the remediation plan.
• Implement, maintain, and drive the remediation plans of your platforms' Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Work with engineers of all levels to help them with automation and observability best practices. 
• Review incidents and post-mortems, recommend, and implement improvements accordingly. 
• Participate in on-call rotation to provide timely technical support for emergent issues

What you will bring to our team:

• Deep understanding of public cloud web platforms preferably in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or AWS.
• Embrace the mindset of treating the "Platform as a Product"
• Strong architectural knowledge for designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• Proven experience as an infrastructure engineer/cloud engineer / DevOps engineer designing and supporting highly available large web systems.
  
• Strong experience with "infrastructure as code" and automation, using tools like Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack, Chef, Puppet.
• Strong Networking Skills: VPCs, Security Groups, DNS, DHCP, IP, Firewall, Switching, Routing, Load-Balancing.
• Hands on experience with containerisation, micro-services, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD. 
• Able to guide, inspire, and mentor their team by setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and promoting a culture of continuous learning and growth.
• Able to convey complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders effectively.
• Able to think critically and make informed decisions under pressure.
• Good level of understanding of Cloud Native application development.
• Open to adopting new tools and methodologies to enhance the platform's capabilities.
• Practical working knowledge of technologies and practices that are key to Trade Me's technical strategy. 
• Excellent communication, mentoring skills and experience supporting developers in their technical career growth
• Experience with distributed systems architecture and best practices. 
• Tertiary qualification with a degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience). 
• Experience in similar roles with progressive increases in responsibility. 
• Experiences in mentoring team members and contributing to the growth of the team.
  

You'll have the best time working at Trade Me, and this is why:

#Flexibility: Flexibility means different things to different people and we support you to find what works, including a home office set up and utilities allowance. We value team connection and come together in person on Monday and at least one other day a week.

#Wellness: Being your best self means caring for your physical and mental wellbeing, we offer lots of resources to help you along the way.

#Leave: We support you with leave when you need it, including 5 days of wellness leave each year and 10 days of sick leave from day 1.

#Social: Nothing beats getting together to have some fun and celebrate our success. Join us in the office on payday for company paid lunches. Regular Friday drinks and nibbles, annual Trade Me company awards, celebrations and more.

#Learning: Whether it's on the job, formal training, mentoring or something else, you'll grow with us from Day 1.

We know some candidates can be reluctant to apply for roles if they feel they don't 'tick all the boxes'. If you're excited about this opportunity, we'd still really like to hear from you so please send us your resume and a short cover note outlining the "Why".

Trade Me is an INZ accredited employer. We truly value diversity and embrace a flexible workplace where people are encouraged to achieve their potential.

Check out the job description for this role here