Lead Engineer - Site Reliability

Kiwibank; New Zealand; On-site; NZD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working arrangements

One wellbeing day a quarter

Health and life cover

Discounted banking

Insurance products

New parents package

Job summary

Kiwibank is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to join the Technology Reliability, Operations and Risk team in a 24-month fixed-term role, based in Auckland or Wellington. You will boost reliability, observability, and performance, partnering with engineers and delivery teams to migrate to a modern banking platform.

The role is hands-on with leadership responsibilities, including guiding teams through production readiness, incident response, and development of resilient services.

Qualifications

• Senior or lead level experience in incident response, performance and reliability engineering.
• Experience with observability, SLIs/SLOs, and monitoring customer journeys.
• Strong CI/CD experience and declarative deployment practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on reliability engineering across platforms to improve uptime and performance.
• Elevate observability and performance engineering across teams and services.
• Guide production readiness and incident response; mentor engineers and drive best practices.

Skills

Senior leadership

Incident response

Reliability engineering

Observability

Performance engineering

CI/CD

Security mindset

Agile/DevOps

Mentoring

Tools

Dynatrace

Sumo Logic

GraphQL

IaC

Job description

• Auckland/Wellington based opportunity


• Key Lead Engineer (SRE) role working across tech reliability team.


• Great 24-month fixed-term opportunity

Kō tātou tēnei. Hei kawe i ngā mahi kia tutuki | This is us. Where making an impact matters.

We're on the lookout for a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to join our Technology Reliability, Operations and Risk team, supporting Kiwibank's largest ever technology change and customer migration.

• In this role, you'll work alongside an existing Lead SRE and report to the GM Technology Reliability, Operations and Risk, lifting reliability and observability practices across the bank. You'll partner closely with Principal Engineers, delivery teams and the Transformation programme to keep customers safe and our services reliable as we migrate to a modern banking platform.


• This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you'll uplift customer journey observability, performance and stability, guide teams through production readiness, and help shorten the time it takes to detect and recover from issues. You'll lead through hands on work, influence and mentoring, building reliability, observability and performance into everything we ship.

Please note, this role may require an on call component.

Ko tātou tēnei. Kia hāpai i ō pūkenga | This is us. Where your expertise matters.

Skills and experience we're looking for:

• A proven track record at senior or lead level in incident response, performance and reliability engineering, in complex production environments including cloud and SaaS.


• Strong observability and performance engineering skills, including customer journey and real-user monitoring, synthetics, and performance tuning across languages and databases (for example C#, Python, IaC, GraphQL and query optimisation). Skills should include expertise in Application performance monitoring and Log correlation tooling such as Dynatrace and SumoLogic or similar alternatives.


• Solid experience with CI/CD, delivering through declarative deployment with automated quality and security built in. We ship our infrastructure the same way we ship our apps.


• Experience building run-time and build-time components to support, shape and secure the platform.


• A security-first mindset, with experience partnering across governance functions such as security, risk and change.


• A proven ability to influence and improve engineering practices and patterns in an Agile or DevOps environment, coaching and mentoring others.

Bonus:

• Experience working in banking, financial services or another highly regulated environment.


• Experience with automated infrastructure, component and integration testing, and other non-functional testing such as security or performance.


• Experience supporting large, multi-quarter technology initiatives or migrations, and explaining highly technical ideas to non-technical stakeholders.

Ko tātou tēnei - Hei hāpai i a koe, me tō whānau | This is us. Where you and your whānau matter.

We want you to get the most out of work and life, so you will have the option to explore flexible working arrangements that suit both your needs and ours. We now also offer one wellbeing day a quarter to ensure our people are taken care of and can bring their best selves to work.

Benefits

• flexible working arrangements that suit both your needs and ours


• one wellbeing day a quarter


• health and life cover


• discounted banking


• insurance products


• an incredible package for new parents

We are proud to be a certified B Corporation, a Pride Pledge partner and we are the first bank in Aotearoa to get the Gender Tick. We are also an accredited Living Wage employer.

Applications close Monday the 31st August

Please note: Due to a high volume of applications, there may be a delay in our response. Thank you for your patience.