Senior Cloud Test Engineer & Data Platform Leader

CGR Services; Wellington; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 162,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

37.5 hours work week

Sick leave 15 days

End-of-year days off

Annual flu vaccines

Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)

Job summary

Stats NZ is seeking a Principal Cloud Test Engineer to lead quality engineering for the IDI data platform. You will shape automation, testing frameworks and governance, guiding teams across complex data services in a government context.

In this senior role, you will influence architecture, deliver scalable test strategies, and mentor delivery teams while ensuring security, reliability and operational resilience across cloud-based platforms.

Qualifications

• Proven experience operating at Principal Test Engineer level or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Experience designing and implementing test automation architectures scalable, maintainable, reusable, and integrated with CI/CD.
• Strong full-stack engineering capability across architecture, data, APIs, integration, performance and maintainability.
• Senior-level experience with modern cloud platforms and cloud-native practices.
• Experience testing data platforms, data pipelines, analytical solutions, distributed systems or other complex data services.
• Ability to work through ambiguity, balancing delivery with long-term quality and architectural direction.

Responsibilities

• Lead adoption of modern quality engineering practices across the Data Platform team.
• Develop and maintain data platform quality engineering approach including test automation and data quality controls.
• Embed automation-first practices with CI/CD integrated testing and automated quality gates.
• Design reusable test architectures, frameworks, tooling and patterns for multiple teams and products.
• Provide technical guidance on usability, accessibility, scalability, security, reliability and maintainability.
• Contribute to standards for data ingestion, transformation, quality, lineage, observability and resilience.
• Evaluate new testing technologies and apply those with demonstrable value.
• Produce clear test strategies and documentation to support ownership by internal teams.
• Drive continuous improvement from testing outcomes, incidents and delivery feedback.

Skills

Senior technical leadership

Test automation architecture

Full-stack engineering

Cloud platforms

Data platforms testing

Communication skills

Job description

Stats NZ is seeking a Principal Cloud Test Engineer to lead quality engineering for the IDI data platform. You will shape automation, testing frameworks and governance, guiding teams across complex data services in a government context.

In this senior role, you will influence architecture, deliver scalable test strategies, and mentor delivery teams while ensuring security, reliability and operational resilience across cloud-based platforms.