Platform Engineering Lead – Cloud-Native & DX

Stuff; Wellington; On-site; NZD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Stuff in Wellington is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the evolution of the engineering platform and set the Golden Path for delivery. You’ll lead the platform team and build an ecosystem engineers want to build on, focusing on cloud-native modernization and operational maturity across the organization.

You’ll manage Kubernetes on AWS EKS, drive IaC with Terraform, and shape observability, caching, security and cost efficiency. Mentorship and cross-team collaboration are essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in senior platform engineering, DevOps or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Strong hands-on Kubernetes experience running production workloads at scale.
• Deep AWS, IaC with Terraform, CI/CD and modern delivery practices.
• Observability depth: OpenTelemetry, SigNoz or New Relic, and log analytics with OpenSearch.
• Caching infrastructure design and ElastiCache experience.
• Leadership of small platform teams, prioritisation, coaching and hiring.
• Secure-by-default design including OAuth, OpenID Connect, RBAC and secrets management.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our Golden Path for software delivery, from development to production.
• Drive platform engineering as a product, balancing developer experience, reliability, security and cost.
• Lead a small platform team: set direction, roadmaps and capability growth.
• Own our Kubernetes estate on AWS EKS, including cluster lifecycle and upgrades.
• Lead cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, Kubernetes, Spinnaker and Jenkins.
• Own observability strategy end-to-end, from OpenTelemetry instrumentation standards through to the tooling teams use to answer their own questions about production.
• Set caching and content delivery strategy, from CDN and edge caching through to in-cluster HTTP caching and ElastiCache.
• Improve resilience and operational excellence, including SLOs, incident response, on-call practice and performance at high traffic volumes.
• Keep the platform secure by default, embedding automated controls, access standards and policy enforcement into engineering workflows.
• Mentor engineers, influence architecture decisions and raise engineering capability across teams.

Skills

Kubernetes at scale

AWS EKS

Terraform & IaC

CI/CD

Observability

OpenTelemetry

OpenSearch

SigNoz

New Relic

ElastiCache

Leadership & hiring

Security by default (IAM/OAuth/RBAC)

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Spinnaker

Jenkins

OpenTelemetry

OpenSearch

SigNoz

New Relic

ElastiCache

Job description

Stuff in Wellington is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the evolution of the engineering platform and set the Golden Path for delivery. You’ll lead the platform team and build an ecosystem engineers want to build on, focusing on cloud-native modernization and operational maturity across the organization.

You’ll manage Kubernetes on AWS EKS, drive IaC with Terraform, and shape observability, caching, security and cost efficiency. Mentorship and cross-team collaboration are essential.