Principal Software Engineer: AI-Driven Tech Leader

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi; Wellington; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working arrangements

Five weeks annual leave

Income protection and critical illness

Professional development

Collaborative and inclusive culture

Job summary

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership across our teams, platforms and delivery. You’ll lead hands-on across frontend, backend, mobile and integration engineering and stay close to delivery.

You’ll mentor engineers, shape software strategy, and advance AI augmented engineering with a strong security posture.

Qualifications

• Deep software engineering expertise with analytical problem-solving for complex challenges.
• Experience establishing engineering standards, patterns, guardrails, and reusable approaches.
• Future-focused vision for AI augmented engineering, capable of experimentation and scaling.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across complex, high impact challenges.
• Lead development and adoption of engineering standards, patterns, guardrails and reusable approaches.
• Lead evolution of AI augmented engineering and scale new approaches across teams.
• Bring systems thinking across frontend, backend, integration, data and cloud tech.
• Influence software strategy and major technical decisions across platforms.
• Provide design leadership and assurance for high-risk work.
• Mentor engineers and grow future technical leaders.
• Build alignment across Engineering, Architecture, Security, Platforms and Product.
• Champion DevSecOps and shift-left security across the SDLC.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

React

REST APIs

PostgreSQL

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

DevSecOps

Security

Leadership

Mentoring

Systems thinking

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub

GitHub Actions

Azure

Job description

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership across our teams, platforms and delivery. You’ll lead hands-on across frontend, backend, mobile and integration engineering and stay close to delivery.

You’ll mentor engineers, shape software strategy, and advance AI augmented engineering with a strong security posture.