Principal Software Engineer — AI Driven, Secure Delivery Leader

New Zealand Transport Agency; Auckland; Hybrid; NZD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working arrangements

Five weeks annual leave

Income Protection & Critical Illness

Professional development and career 성장

Collaborative and inclusive culture

Job summary

NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership and accelerate AI augmented delivery. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead across frontend, backend, mobile and integration teams, shaping long-term engineering direction while remaining hands-on.

You will mentor engineers, set standards and guardrails, champion DevSecOps, and influence technology strategy across platforms.

Qualifications

• Seasoned software engineer with leadership experience across complex projects.
• Proven ability to establish and embed engineering standards and reusable patterns.
• Vision for AI augmented engineering and its practical application.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across high-impact engineering challenges.
• Lead development and adoption of engineering standards, patterns, guardrails.
• Drive evolution of AI augmented engineering and scalable approaches.
• Apply systems thinking across frontend, backend, integration and data.
• Influence software strategy, technical direction and major engineering decisions.
• Offer enterprise‑level technical design leadership with risk-aware governance.
• Mentor engineers from graduate to senior levels to grow capability.
• Align Engineering, Architecture, Security, Platforms, Product and delivery teams.
• Champion DevSecOps, automation and shift-left security across the SDLC.

Skills

Software engineering

Engineering standards

AI augmentation

Frontend/Backend

Cloud technologies

DevSecOps

Mentoring

Systems thinking

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

React

REST APIs

PostgreSQL

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Job description

NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership and accelerate AI augmented delivery. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead across frontend, backend, mobile and integration teams, shaping long-term engineering direction while remaining hands-on.

You will mentor engineers, set standards and guardrails, champion DevSecOps, and influence technology strategy across platforms.