Lead Software 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 a Lead Software Engineer, you'll drive technical decisions for your squad, turning customer needs into reliable, high-quality software. This is a hands-on role: code, review, architect, and make smart trade-offs to keep delivery flowing.

What you'll do:

• Own engineering quality and delivery speed — ship small, frequent, confident changes.

• Build clean, testable, reusable solutions across the stack.

• Keep services reliable, observable, and maintainable; pipelines fast and green.

• Manage technical health and debt while balancing delivery priorities.

• Collaborate with Product, Platform, and Architecture teams to guide decisions.

• Coach developers and testers, fostering autonomy and technical craft.

• Champion responsible AI use to accelerate development and share insights.

If you love solving complex problems, mentoring others, and shaping technical excellence, join us to make a real impact.

What you'll bring:

• Technical depth: Expertise in ASP.NET, React, Angular, NodeJS, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET Core, Git, Azure, ADO, Docker, Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform. Strong design skills across services and UI, with diagnosability and operability built in.

• Testing excellence: Robust unit, contract, API, and component testing; practical E2E approach; experience with ephemeral environments.

• Delivery focus: Skilled in CI/CD optimisation, build systems, artifact management, and reducing flakiness. Solid cloud and platform knowledge—favouring golden paths over bespoke solutions.

• Security & reliability: Secure coding, dependency management, secrets handling, least privilege. Design observable systems with clear SLOs, alerts, and runbooks.

• Collaboration & communication: Effective in cross-functional teams, strong at iterative delivery, story slicing, estimation, and risk management. Guide progress through partnership, not gatekeeping.

• Mindset: Curious, open to feedback, and create a safe space for challenging 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