Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer

Location: New Zealand (Fully remote)

Salary: NZ$250,000 – $280,000 base

Visa: Must be based in New Zealand with full working rights

About the company

A private equity-backed B2B SaaS group in the healthcare sector, made up of several established software businesses operating across multiple countries. Their products are used every day by thousands of organisations, and the group is growing both organically and through acquisition.

They’ve now started a large-scale modernisation program across the whole product suite. The aim is to bring separate products together into one unified platform. It’s a regulated, traditionally slow-moving industry, which makes it a hard problem, and one with the investment and backing to be solved properly.

About the role

The group is hiring several very senior engineers in New Zealand to work directly with its engineering leader on the biggest problems in the business. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not people management. You’ll own problems end to end across architecture, data, integration and operability. You’ll drive the modernisation of legacy platforms onto a modern .NET, React and Postgres stack, and help shape how the wider engineering organisation uses agentic AI in delivery. There’s room to take on a broader architecture and technical strategy role if that interests you.

What you will need

• Deep, broad software engineering experience. A systems thinker across architecture, data, integration and operability, not a single-language specialist
• Strong .NET background (Go is also highly regarded), comfortable with React and Postgres
• Real experience setting up agentic AI workflows in delivery: what you delegate, how you verify, the guardrails you put in place and what changed for the team. Using AI to write code or building AI features isn’t the same thing
• Comfortable in legacy code and keen to modernise it, rather than waiting for greenfield
• Experience leading and mentoring engineers and lifting the capability of a team
• A background in companies or teams with structured processes and strong product and engineering collaboration
• Clear, concise communication, which is essential in a distributed, remote-first team

Nice to have

• PHP experience
• Experience leading large-scale modernisation or re-platforming programs
• Healthcare or other regulated-industry experience
• Experience working with distributed and offshore teams

Who does well here

People who take initiative and would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. They bring ideas to leadership instead of waiting to be told what to do. Pragmatists and realists with no interest in dogma or theological debates, who get excited about building things at pace and without red tape.

Interview process

Two stages: a conversation with members of the product and delivery team, then a technical discussion with the engineering leader. There are no technical tests or live coding, just conversations about the depth and breadth of your experience.