Principal Software Engineer — AI-Driven Technical Leader

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi; Palmerston North; On-site; NZD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working arrangements

Five weeks annual leave

Income Protection and Critical Illness

Job summary

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership across our teams, platforms and delivery. You’ll combine strategic thinking with hands‑on delivery across frontend, backend, mobile and integration engineering.

You’ll drive engineering standards and secure delivery, mentor engineers and shape the future of AI augmented engineering with a strong security posture for NZTA.

Qualifications

• Deep software engineering expertise with the ability to tackle complex challenges.
• Experience establishing and embedding engineering standards, patterns and guardrails.
• Vision for AI augmented engineering and scalable security practices.
• Broad technical expertise across backend, frontend, integration, data and cloud technologies.
• Strong SDLC and DevSecOps understanding; ability to influence across teams without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership across complex, high impact engineering challenges.
• Lead the development and adoption of engineering standards, patterns, guardrails and reusable approaches.
• Lead the evolution of AI augmented engineering and scale innovative approaches.
• Bring systems thinking across frontend, backend, mobile and integration engineering.
• Influence software strategy and major engineering decisions across teams and platforms.
• Mentor engineers from graduate to senior level and grow the chapter's capability.

Skills

Software engineering leadership

Engineering standards

AI augmentation

DevSecOps

Systems thinking

Java

Spring Boot

React

REST APIs

PostgreSQL

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Mentoring engineers

Security posture

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Azure

React

Spring Boot

Java

REST APIs

PostgreSQL

Job description

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi is establishing Principal Engineering within Software Engineering to strengthen technical leadership across our teams, platforms and delivery. You’ll combine strategic thinking with hands‑on delivery across frontend, backend, mobile and integration engineering.

You’ll drive engineering standards and secure delivery, mentor engineers and shape the future of AI augmented engineering with a strong security posture for NZTA.