Principal Engineer, Platform & Security

About the Role

Join a leading team responsible for building the engineering platform that supports over two million monthly users of stuff.co.nz. As Principal Engineer, you will lead the evolution of our platform by defining best practices, managing cloud infrastructure modernization, and enhancing the operational maturity across our engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and continually improve our "Golden Path" for software delivery, covering processes from local development environments through to production deployment.
• Lead platform engineering as a product, carefully balancing developer experience, reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness.
• Manage a small, focused platform team by setting the technical direction, shaping the roadmap, and mentoring to build team capabilities.
• Oversee Kubernetes clusters running on AWS EKS, including lifecycle management, upgrades, autoscaling, ingress control, and traffic management.
• Drive cloud infrastructure management, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code implementations using technologies such as Terraform, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, and Jenkins.
• Develop and maintain an end-to-end observability strategy, from setting OpenTelemetry instrumentation standards to providing teams with tools for comprehensive production monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Formulate caching and content delivery strategies involving CDN, edge caching, in-cluster HTTP caching, and use of AWS ElastiCache.
• Enhance system resilience and operational excellence through defining SLOs, implementing incident response protocols, managing on-call duties, and optimizing performance under heavy load.
• Ensure the platform maintains a secure-by-default posture by embedding automated security controls, access governance, and policy enforcement within engineering workflows.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to engineers, influence architectural choices, and elevate overall engineering standards across multiple teams.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Proven track record in senior roles within platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure domains.
• Extensive hands-on experience managing production-scale Kubernetes environments, ideally within AWS EKS.
• Deep knowledge of AWS services, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD methodologies, and modern software delivery practices.
• Strong practical expertise in observability tools and frameworks including OpenTelemetry, and platforms such as SigNoz, New Relic, and OpenSearch for log analysis.
• Experience developing and operating caching infrastructure and strategies, including AWS ElastiCache.
• Demonstrated leadership of small teams, including skills in task prioritization, coaching, and recruitment.
• A solid foundation in security-oriented design principles, identity and access management protocols such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, RBAC, and secrets management practices.
• Ability to lead by influence, mentor engineers broadly, and promote technical excellence across diverse teams.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with zero-trust network architecture and service mesh technologies.
• Experience with DevSecOps tools, including policy as code, dependency scanning, and image scanning.
• Understanding of security and compliance standards like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
• Knowledge of Fastly or similar CDN and edge computing platforms, as well as exposure to Azure or Google Cloud Platform alongside AWS.
• Background working on high-traffic consumer, media, or publishing platforms.

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to play a critical role in sculpting the engineering foundation at Stuff by building robust platforms that accelerate product delivery while ensuring security and protection of systems, data, and customers. If you have a passion for platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and enhancing developer experience, and want to make a meaningful contribution across a modern product-focused organisation, we encourage you to apply.

Inclusion and Diversity

Stuff is committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that reflects the diverse communities of New Zealand. We encourage applications from people of all genders, ethnicities, abilities, ages, and backgrounds. We provide equal employment opportunities for all applicants.