Lead Software Engineer

Westpac New Zealand Limited; Auckland; Hybrid; NZD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday leave

Additional leave options

Banking benefits

Insurance discounts

Superannuation

Development opportunities

Volunteer days

Recognition program

School holiday subsidy

Job summary

Westpac New Zealand Limited in Auckland is seeking a Lead Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across multiple squads, balancing coding with strategic direction and team development. You will influence architecture, drive engineering excellence, guide design decisions, and foster a collaborative, high-performing culture while delivering secure, scalable digital experiences for customers.

The role expects 5+ years in relevant engineering roles, experience leading small teams, and

Qualifications

• Experience 5+ years in engineering roles.
• Experience leading small teams and Agile practices.
• Hands-on coding with leadership responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across up to two squads.
• Influence architectural decisions and drive engineering excellence.
• Mentor and uplift engineers, ensuring delivery and quality.

Job description

Mō te tūranga | About the Role

Provides hands on technical leadership across up to two squads, ensuring high quality delivery, modern engineering practices, and strong collaboration that drives customer focused and strategic outcomes. The role balances a breadth of technical expertise with guiding, enabling, and uplifting the team while continually improving ways of working and engineering excellence across Digital. As a Lead Engineer in the Digital team, you will play a pivotal role to collaborate with Engineers, Designers, Architects, Craft Specialists, Principal Engineers, and key stakeholders across the bank to ensure we:

• Deliver outstanding digital experiences for our customers
• Provide strategic technical leadership across your technology area, shaping long-term engineering direction and ensuring decisions support both the business strategy and target architecture
• Build solutions aligned with best industry practice
• Influence and ensure engineering decisions are aligned with business goals to support the technical roadmap
• Identify and advocate for opportunities to drive business value through technology, identifying and leading organisation wide improvements
• Shape, champion and comply with internal standards and policies
• Minimise and manage technical debt
• Support and role model agreed squad work practices while fostering a positive team culture, improving team health and reduction of cognitive load
• Create a development community shaping shared behaviours and engineering culture
• Shape sprint goals that align with delivery, customer, and strategic outcomes
• Be viewed as a subject matter expert
• Accountability for operational readiness

This role balances hands-on engineering with leadership responsibilities driving a development community beyond squad level. You’ll spend approximately 50% of your time contributing directly to squad work, and 50% enabling, mentoring, and guiding your team to continuously improve. The exact balance may vary based on squad needs and leadership direction.

Team Performance

Ensure your team produces high-quality work and delivers on time, including surfacing trade-offs and key decisions. Act as the first point of contact when engineers face difficulties. Support engineers by providing structured coaching and career guidance, creating growth opportunities for engineers across squads. Remove obstacles and blockers for your team. Absorb outside distractions and noise to keep the team focused. Ensure the team achieves consistent velocity. Use metrics to guide decisions and improve team performance. Take ownership of end-to-end delivery of features and systems. Ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of owned systems. Ensure security best practices are embedded in design and implementation. Champion continuous improvement through retros and experimentation. Drive initiatives that improve team health.

Technical Expertise

This is a hands-on role, where you will actively contribute to coding, lead architectural decisions, set technical direction, solution design, and technical leadership within your team. Stay up to date with the latest technical requirements in digital and the wider business, as well as industry standards. Leads responsible AI adoption by setting clear guardrails, evaluating risk, maintaining human accountability, and building shared capability to improve engineering effectiveness. Champion engineering excellence and ensure we move towards our target architecture with every decision we make. Review and approve pull requests and be proficient with CI/CD Pipelines. Be an expert in one field while being able to work across multiple areas. Monitor and troubleshoot system performance on an ad-hoc basis. Manage and elevate incidents assigned to the team. Work with the PO/SO to manage and prioritise technical debt. Develop expert-level knowledge of the features your squad delivers, while maintaining a solid understanding of the surrounding product areas, systems, and teams your work connects with.

Planning and Leading

Work with Architects & Principal Engineers to design new solutions your squad will deliver. Help PO/SO produce realistic roadmaps and plans. Influence cross-team priorities. Resolve organisational level blockers. Work on design documentation and guide through relevant governance processes. Where relevant, attend Design Council alongside relevant TAL to ensure designs are aligned with RED Framework capability. Work with the PO/SO to ensure non-functional requirements are planned for and delivered. Escalate to relevant colleagues and management when the team faces technical problems they can’t solve. Work with the team to refine and flesh out stories, breaking down work into manageable pieces for the team to deliver. Work with your squad, delivery and ways of working practitioners to coordinate deployment and releases for the team's work. Collaborate across squads and departments to solve systemic challenges. Influence engineering standards and practices across the wider org.

Mentoring and Team Culture

Work with other Lead Engineers to ensure there is a consistent approach to upskilling/mentoring other Engineers. Mentor and up-skill Associate Engineers, Engineers and Senior Engineers providing regular feedback. Promote a positive team culture. Facilitate effective communication within the team. Encourage open debate but support the final decisions. Promote process improvements, both technical and ways of working. Advocate a culture of Automation. Coach and mentor the team in advanced programming techniques such as effective unit testing, dependency injection, asynchronous IO, etc. Support the growth of your peers by encouraging stretch opportunities and growth paths across multiple levels. Contribute to a psychologically safe and inclusive team culture.

Nā tāu rourou | What will you bring?

Experience 5+ years relevant experience. This Lead Engineer role will support a squad that covers the full stack so a range of experience is required. Able to speak about experience leading small teams (not necessarily as a line manager). Experience in Agile Teams, who have had Development and Operations responsibilities. Institutional Banking experience highly desired.

Skills and Knowledge

Proficient in modern software development practices and tools. Strong understanding of software architecture and design principles. Experience with cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines. Skilled in unit testing, code reviews, and debugging. Ability to break down complex problems and deliver practical solutions.

Westpac Hei Wāhi Mahi | Working at Westpac

In addition to immersing yourself in a supportive team environment, you'll receive some great job perks and benefits including:

• 4 weeks standard holiday + 5 additional days of wellbeing leave to support you to be your best
• Additional purchased leave options up to 4 weeks per year
• Banking benefits, insurance discounts and superannuation scheme
• Growth and development – we provide opportunities for development and promote internal mobility
• Recognition - we recognise and reward our star performers
• School holiday subsidy - help you balance work and family during school holiday
• 2 Volunteer days per year

Ko mātou tēnei | Our Organisation At Westpac

At Westpac, we’re working together to build a fairer and stronger New Zealand for our people, customers, and communities. For over 160 years we’ve been driven by our purpose to Create Better Futures Together. What makes us unique are the incredible people we’re lucky enough to have walk through our doors every day. The giant ‘W’ on our building doesn’t just stand for Westpac – it says, double you. We’re a place that values, rewards and recognises individuality. Where you can be your whole self, your true self, and your best self. We’re recognised as a place where talent is developed, where passions are fuelled and where ambitions of all shapes and sizes thrive. And it all starts with you! Tono mai ināianei!

We encourage people from all walks of life to apply, including those who are neurodiverse, have chronic health conditions or disabilities – your attitude and passion are as important to us as your experience, qualifications and capabilities.

Mahi tahi tātou, kaha ake tātou | Together Greater Applications close: 7 September 2026

Our culture is rich with stories of how our people like to help, our customers, our community and each other. This is reflected through flexible working arrangements to ensure that our people have a balance in their life with those things that are important to them. Through ensuring that we provide opportunities to everyone regardless of what society throws at them, we are a safe place to work where you are treated equally and appreciated.