Principal Engineer, Platform

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

The Role

Build the platform that powers great engineering and great products.

More than two million Kiwis visit stuff.co.nz every month, and the engineering platform underpinning that experience is evolving fast. We're looking for a Principal Engineer to own that evolution: setting the Golden Path, leading our platform team, and building a platform that engineering teams genuinely want to build on.

This isn't a maintenance role. You'll shape platform strategy, drive cloud-native modernisation, and lift operational maturity across the engineering organisation.

What You’ll Do

• Own and evolve our Golden Path for software delivery, from local development to production.
• Drive platform engineering as a product, balancing developer experience, reliability, security and cost efficiency.
• Lead a small platform team: set technical direction, shape the roadmap and grow the team's capability.
• Own our Kubernetes estate on AWS EKS, including cluster lifecycle and upgrades, autoscaling, ingress and traffic management.
• Lead cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code practices using technologies such as 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.

What You’ll Bring

• Extensive experience in senior platform engineering, DevOps or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Very strong hands‑on Kubernetes experience running production workloads at scale, ideally on AWS EKS.
• Deep expertise in AWS, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
• Practical observability depth: OpenTelemetry, platforms such as SigNoz or New Relic, and log analytics with OpenSearch.
• Experience designing caching strategies and operating caching infrastructure such as ElastiCache.
• Experience leading a small platform team, including prioritisation, coaching and hiring.
• Solid grounding in secure‑by‑default design, identity and access management including OAuth, OpenID Connect and RBAC, and secrets management.
• A proven ability to lead through influence, coach engineers and drive technical excellence across multiple teams.

Nice to have

• Zero‑trust network architecture and service mesh experience.
• DevSecOps tooling and policy as code, including dependency and image scanning.
• Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
• Fastly or comparable CDN and edge compute platforms, and exposure to Azure or GCP alongside AWS.
• Background in high‑traffic consumer, media or publishing platforms.

Why join us?

You'll play a pivotal role in shaping the engineering foundations of the organisation, building platforms that accelerate delivery while keeping systems, data and customers protected.

If you're passionate about platform engineering, cloud infrastructure and developer experience, and want to make a lasting impact across a modern product organisation, we'd love to hear from you.

Stuff champions inclusion. Be it gender, ethnicity, beliefs, abilities or experiences, we know that diversity brings another lens through which we all learn, connect and grow.

E kōkiri nei a Stuff i te whāinga kia whai wāhi ai te katoa. Hāunga te ira, te iwi, ngā whakapono, ngā āheinga, ngā wheako rānei o te tangata, e mōhio nei tātou mā te kanorau e whai tirohanga hou ai, e ako ai, e tūhono ai, e whanake anō ai tātou katoa.

As we are committed to creating a workplace that reflects the diverse communities in New Zealand, we will always invite and encourage applications from people of all genders, ethnicities, disabilities and ages. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all.

Nā runga i tā mātou ū ki tētahi taiao mahi e whakaatu ana i te kanorau o ngā hapori i Aotearoa, i te ao, i te pō, ka pōhiringia, ka ākina anō ngā tono mahi a te marea whānui, hāunga te ira, te iwi, te hauātanga, te pakeke rānei. E ū nei mātou ki te whai kia wātea ai ā mātou ara whai mahi ki te katoa i runga i te mana taurite.