Principal Quality Engineer

About Us

Southern Cross Health Insurance is dedicated to fostering a healthier New Zealand by empowering members to maintain wellness for longer. We provide peace of mind through timely access to quality care, promote healthier living, and drive positive transformation in the healthcare system. As a New Zealand-owned, member-centric organisation, we aim to place wellbeing at the center of all our efforts, offering outstanding value to our members and cultivating a thriving work environment.

About the Role

This role leads the quality engineering efforts within a Value Stream of the Digital Platforms teams, which deliver crucial systems in support of nearly one million members nationwide. You will partner with the Value Stream Principal Engineer to define and implement a quality strategy that integrates quality assurance early in the development lifecycle. Key priorities include optimizing the testing pyramid, surfacing risks during refinement rather than at deployment, and simplifying availability of test data, environments, and quality gates for squads.

Central to your work is mentoring engineers at all levels, leading the Quality Engineering Community of Practice, and advising on major technical decisions. You'll engage comfortably with detailed pipeline and code review processes, as well as communicating quality risks and trade-offs to stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and refine the Value Stream's quality strategies collaboratively with Engineering Practice and architectural colleagues.
• Partner with senior technology leaders to balance quality, reliability, and delivery goals.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pair programming, structured feedback, and capability assessments.
• Lead the Quality Engineering Community of Practice to share successful practices and set standards.
• Collaborate with Platform and Architecture teams to enhance golden paths covering test data, environments, and quality gates in pipelines.
• Facilitate cross-squad decisions on quality and testing standards using data-driven approaches.
• Evaluate significant quality engineering initiatives and their success criteria.
• Investigate and learn from major production incidents alongside squads, integrating findings into standards and capability improvements.
• Translate product priorities into actionable quality decisions and explain technical realities clearly to stakeholders.

Requirements

• Proven experience elevating engineering practices across multiple teams without relying solely on authority.
• Strong software development skills across several programming languages.
• Deep knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native architectures, secure coding, and data-driven quality measures such as DORA metrics.
• Expertise in optimizing the testing pyramid with a focus on automation across all layers, especially within distributed systems.
• Experience with observability practices, including SLI/SLO design, and improving Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).
• Strong understanding of risk-based testing methods, quality gate designs, test data management, as well as performance, accessibility and compliance automation testing.
• Experience leading Communities of Practice and coaching senior engineers.
• A collaborative mindset for working across Architecture, Platform, Security, and Product teams.

Why Work With Us

Southern Cross is investing in its people, technology, and mission, prioritizing the strengthening of our foundations and enhancing team capabilities. This role offers significant ownership of quality engineering practices within the Value Stream and close collaboration with senior technical leadership. Our company culture fosters diversity, wellbeing, and professional growth, supported by benefits such as wellbeing leave, health insurance for employees and their immediate families, life and pet insurance discounts, additional parental leave, financial wellbeing support, flexible leave options, and annual volunteer days.

Additional Information

This is an Auckland-based position; while we welcome interest from elsewhere, remote work is not available at this time. Southern Cross is committed to diversity and inclusion, having taken the Pride Pledge and maintaining active employee-led diversity networks including Rainbow, Māori, Pasifika, Neurodiversity, and Whānau Support forums.