Software Engineer - Engineering Enablement

Phocas Ltd; Christchurch; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Southern Cross health insurance

Life insurance

TPD and income protection

Extra paid parental leave

Hybrid working

Flexible hours

Job summary

Phocas Ltd in Christchurch is seeking an engineer to join our Engineering Enablement team—the people who make every other team faster.

You will identify bottlenecks, improve CI/CD, and collaborate with product, platform, security, and operations to deliver high-leverage fixes. The role blends development, DevOps, and AI tooling to accelerate delivery across teams.

Qualifications

• 3-4 years of software development experience.
• Solid application development skills.
• Some DevOps experience: CI/CD, observability, infra-as-code.

Responsibilities

• Identify and remove bottlenecks slowing teams down: tooling, automation, documentation.
• Improve and maintain CI/CD pipelines, observability stack, and IaC.
• Consult across product teams to understand pain points and fix high-leverage issues.
• Help teams adopt AI tools and explore AI-driven improvements in software delivery.
• Write clear documentation that is read and used.
• Handle diverse problems and technologies with speed and flexibility.

Skills

Software development

DevOps

Cloud AWS

Communication

Technical writing

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

Some engineers ship features. Others change how features get shipped.

At Phocas, we've spent 20+ years building financial planning and analytics products that are powerful yet simple to use. We've grown to nearly 300 people across the globe, and our Product & Technology team in Christchurch is at the heart of it. We move fast, we learn from failures, and we're deliberate about how we build, including how we use AI to accelerate the way we work.

Now we're looking for an engineer to join our Engineering Enablement team: the people who make every other team faster.

What you'll do

• Identify and remove the patterns slowing teams down: tooling, automation, documentation, or simply a better way of doing things.
• Improve and maintain our CI/CD pipelines, observability stack, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Consult across every product team at Phocas (plus platform, security, and operations) to understand their pain points and find the highest-leverage fixes.
• Help engineering teams adopt AI tools effectively, and explore forward-thinking ways we can use AI to improve how we build software.
• Write clearly: documentation that actually gets read and followed.
• Switch between problems and technologies fast. This role has more variety than most.

What you'll bring

• 3-4 years of software development experience, ideally including time on a platform, enablement, or shared-services team.
• Solid application development skills: the core of this role is writing good software.
• Some DevOps experience: CI/CD, observability, infrastructure-as-code. You don't need to be a specialist, but you need to be comfortable here.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.
• A pragmatic, outcome-oriented mindset: you measure success by what engineers can actually deliver, not by the elegance of the solution.
• Strong communication and writing skills: you'll be consulting across teams and producing documentation others rely on.
• The kind of person who gets more satisfaction from unblocking someone else than from shipping your own work.
• Security-thinking is a plus.
• You've worked in a small team where there's been no room to hide, and thrived.

Why work at Phocas?

• High-leverage work: improvements you make multiply across every team in the org; the impact is visible and real.
• Variety: you'll work across more technologies, teams, and problem spaces than almost any other role here.
• 10% PD time: one day a fortnight dedicated to learning and development, no questions asked.
• AI-forward culture: we're deliberate and enthusiastic about using AI to improve how we build; this role will be at the centre of that.
• Sunny Sydenham office: spacious, central, with parking for cars, bikes, and scooters.
• Benefits: Southern Cross health insurance, life, TPD and income protection, extra paid parental leave, and more.
• Flexibility: hybrid working and flexible hours.

Phocas is an Accredited Employer and we support international talent, but due to current visa settings and processing times, we can only consider applicants with current New Zealand working rights.

Phocas is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or veteran status.