Principal Engineer, Platform

About the Role

Join Stuff as a Principal Engineer to lead the evolution of our engineering platform that supports over two million monthly visitors on stuff.co.nz. This role is focused on shaping platform strategy, modernising with cloud-native technologies, and enhancing operational excellence. You will create a platform that engineering teams are eager to use and contribute to.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of and continually enhance the Golden Path for software delivery, ranging from local development setups to production environments.
• Manage platform engineering as a product, ensuring a balanced focus on developer experience, reliability, security, and cost effectiveness.
• Lead a dedicated platform team by setting technical direction, defining roadmaps, and fostering team growth.
• Administer and improve Kubernetes clusters hosted on AWS EKS, including cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, autoscaling, ingress, and traffic routing.
• Drive cloud infrastructure initiatives, CI/CD processes, and Infrastructure as Code implementing tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, and Jenkins.
• Develop and maintain an end-to-end observability strategy based on OpenTelemetry instrumentation and tools enabling teams to monitor production environments.
• Define caching and content delivery approaches including CDN, edge caching, HTTP caching within clusters, and use of ElastiCache.
• Enhance system resilience and operational excellence through SLOs, incident response improvements, on-call rotations, and performance optimization under heavy traffic.
• Ensure platform security by integrating automated controls, enforcing access standards, and embedding security policies into engineering workflows.
• Mentor engineers and influence architectural decisions to elevate engineering standards across teams.

Candidate Profile

• Substantial senior experience in platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Advanced hands-on expertise with Kubernetes operating production workloads at scale, particularly on AWS EKS.
• In-depth knowledge of AWS cloud services, Terraform-based Infrastructure as Code, and contemporary CI/CD pipelines and practices.
• Functional expertise with observability platforms including OpenTelemetry and log analytics using systems like SigNoz, New Relic, or OpenSearch.
• Experience designing and managing caching solutions, especially ElastiCache.
• Proven leadership in guiding and developing a small platform engineering team through prioritization, coaching, and recruitment.
• Strong foundation in secure-by-default architecture, identity and access management protocols such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, RBAC, and secrets management.
• Exceptional capability in guiding teams through technical influence, mentorship, and promoting engineering excellence across multiple units.

Additional Valuable Skills

• Knowledge of zero-trust network architecture and service mesh technologies.
• Experience with DevSecOps tooling and policy as code practices, including vulnerability scanning for dependencies and container images.
• Familiarity with security and compliance standards like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
• Exposure to Fastly or similar CDN and edge computing platforms, alongside experience with cloud providers such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Background working with high-traffic consumer-facing, media, or publishing platforms.

Why Join Stuff?

At Stuff, you'll influence the foundational engineering infrastructure, crafting platforms that speed up delivery while maintaining security and customer trust. If you have a passion for platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and improving developer experience, this role offers a meaningful opportunity to make a significant impact within a modern product-focused company.

Inclusion and Diversity

Stuff champions an inclusive work environment valuing diversity across gender, ethnicity, beliefs, abilities, and experiences. Applications from all individuals are encouraged, reflecting our commitment to equal employment opportunities and a workforce representative of New Zealand’s diverse communities.