Lead Engineer

Join to apply for the Lead Engineer role at Southern Cross Health Insurance .

About Us

We're a not-for-profit organisation on a mission to transform ourselves and empower New Zealanders to live their healthiest lives. With almost a million members in our care, we are New Zealand's leading health insurer. We have an unstoppable focus, delivering outstanding experiences to our members in their time of need. This is an exciting time to be part of our journey and in return for your extraordinary talent, we'll provide a high-performing values-based team environment where people are at our heart.

About the Role

You'll lead technical decision-making for your squad at Southern Cross Health Insurance, turning customer needs into working software that delivers value. This is a hands‑on role : you will write code, review pull requests, shape architecture, and make the hard technical trade‑offs that keep delivery moving.

What You’ll Do

• Own the engineering quality and flow for your squad : ship small, frequent changes with short lead times and high confidence. Services are observable, operable, and rarely on fire. CI / CD stays green and fast. Technical debt is visible, prioritised, and shrinking. When incidents happen, you turn learnings into code and process improvements, not just postmortems.
• Work across the stack designing solutions that are clean, testable, and reusable beyond your squad. Default to golden paths and platform patterns, but diverge explicitly, time‑boxed, and feed improvements back to the wider engineering community.
• Own the technical health of your product. Technical debt and key risks are visible, prioritised, and actively managed. Health improves without jeopardising delivery. Make sure the right technical work is in the backlog and advocate for improvements that matter, not firefighting or gold plating.
• Be a constructive partner, not a gatekeeper, by guiding progress through partnership. Align with your Squad Lead, Product Owner, Principal Engineer, Platform, and Architecture teams to balance speed, quality, and reliability. Surface risks early, make trade‑offs transparent, and help the team run experiments that inform product decisions.
• Coach developers and testers through pairing, reviews, and knowledge‑sharing. Raise the bar for the whole squad, growing their autonomy, technical judgment, and craft. Encourage responsible usage of AI to speed development. Capture what you learn and share it across communities of practice.

What You’ll Need

Benefits

Commitment to Diversity

Our commitment to LGBTQIA+ and minority communities is reflected in our culture, and we run a regular Diversity and Inclusion Forum to help ensure this continues to flourish.

Apply Now

If you share our commitment and passion, then apply now!

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