Quality Engineering Lead — Build Reliable, Scalable Software

Southern Cross Health Insurance; Auckland; On-site; NZD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Five days wellbeing leave per year

Health insurance for you and your whān

Life insurance and travel insurance

Extra parental leave benefits

Workplace wellbeing programme

Flexi leave for study or volunteering

Annual volunteer day

Job summary

Southern Cross Health Insurance seeks an experienced Quality Engineering lead to shape and implement quality strategy across Value Streams. You will coach engineers, run the Quality Engineering Community of Practice, and influence decisions impacting test data, environments and pipeline gates.

You will work closely with technical leaders to ensure quality, reliability and timely delivery outcomes while shaping standards and governance across platforms.

Qualifications

• Proven track record uplifting engineering practices across multiple squads.
• Strong coding skills across multiple languages.
• Deep grounding in CI/CD, cloud-native architectures and secure coding, with a data-driven approach using DORA metrics.
• Expertise in test pyramid optimisation and automation across all layers, particularly in distributed systems.
• Experience with observability, SLI/SLO design and improving MTTR.
• Strong knowledge of risk-based testing, quality gate design, test data management, performance testing, and accessibility and compliance automation.
• Experience running Communities of Practice and coaching senior engineers.
• A collaborative approach to working across Architecture, Platform, Security and Product.

Responsibilities

• Set and evolve the Value Stream quality strategy with the Engineering Practice, architecture peers and the wider engineering community.
• Partner with the Head of Technology, Principal Engineer and Technology Leads so quality, reliability and delivery outcomes are considered together.
• Coach Software Engineers and Quality Engineers through code review, pairing, structured feedback and Capability Framework conversations.
• Lead the Quality Engineering Community of Practice as the main venue for sharing patterns and evolving standards.
• Work with Platform and Architecture so golden paths cover test data, environments and pipeline quality gates.
• Facilitate cross-squad technical decisions where quality or testing standards are in question, using data to find a way forward.
• Review significant quality engineering investments and the criteria behind them.
• Investigate significant production incidents alongside squads, and feed learnings back into standards and capability.
• Translate product priorities into quality decisions, and engineering realities back into stakeholder language.

Skills

Coding skills

CI/CD

Cloud-native

Test pyramid

Observability

Risk-based testing

Coaching engineers

Stakeholder comms

Tools

CI/CD Tools

Observability tools

Job description

Southern Cross Health Insurance seeks an experienced Quality Engineering lead to shape and implement quality strategy across Value Streams. You will coach engineers, run the Quality Engineering Community of Practice, and influence decisions impacting test data, environments and pipeline gates.

You will work closely with technical leaders to ensure quality, reliability and timely delivery outcomes while shaping standards and governance across platforms.