Senior Java Lead Developer — Hybrid Wellington

FindIT Recruitment; Wellington; Hybrid; NZD 148,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Contract through 30 June 2027

Hybrid working - 3 days in office 2 at

Competitive hourly rate

Job summary

FindIT Recruitment in Wellington, New Zealand, seeks an experienced Lead Developer to blend hands-on coding with technical leadership across multiple projects. You’ll design, code, troubleshoot and set technical direction while shaping development plans and engineering standards.

Reporting to the Software Engineering Manager, you’ll lead delivery, mentor peers and drive CI/CD pipelines within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.

Qualifications

• Strong Java 17+ development experience, ideally Java 21.
• Experience with Apache Kafka including publishers/consumers.
• Proficiency in Kubernetes/OpenShift deployments.
• CI/CD and DevOps tooling experience.
• Relational DBs such as PostgreSQL.
• Proven technical leadership within software teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication; stakeholder management.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum practices and Jira/Confluence.
• Nice to have Python development experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on application and integration development.
• Develop solutions using Java 17+ and Kafka.
• Provide technical direction to developers.
• Lead planning, estimation and technical delivery.
• Contribute to software design and reviews.
• Design and implement Kafka messaging solutions.
• Support enterprise applications and SaaS/PaaS platforms.
• Lead Level 3 application support and CI/CD pipelines.
• Operate in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments across projects.

Skills

Java development

Java 17+/21

Technical leadership

Kafka

Kubernetes/OpenShift

CI/CD

Git/GitLab

Agile/Scrum

SQL/PostgreSQL

Problem solving

Communication

Tools

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Git

Kubernetes

OpenShift

GitLab

Jira/Confluence

Job description

FindIT Recruitment in Wellington, New Zealand, seeks an experienced Lead Developer to blend hands-on coding with technical leadership across multiple projects. You’ll design, code, troubleshoot and set technical direction while shaping development plans and engineering standards.

Reporting to the Software Engineering Manager, you’ll lead delivery, mentor peers and drive CI/CD pipelines within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.