Here at BNZ, it's about more than just banking. We work together in an agile, energising environment to create innovative solutions through our promise "If you can imagine a better future, let's find a way."

We support wellbeing, flexible working and have a generous leave offering. There is the opportunity for growth, learning and career development. No two days are the same.

We have an exciting opportunity for a senior leader to join BNZ Technology as Chief Engineer and be responsible for driving engineering excellence, strategic technical direction, and operational efficiencies across BNZ’s technology platforms.

Mō te Tūranga | About the Role

The Chief Engineering provides technical leadership to ensure systems are scalable, secure, resilient, and aligned with business outcomes. ​ This role requires expertise in balancing strategy with execution, influencing architecture and delivery practices across domains while fostering an innovation and collaborative engineering culture. The Chief Engineer ensures engineering efforts are future-proof and agile, enabling rapid responses to changing business needs and market trends.

What are some of the responsibilities of this role?

• Technical Strategy: Define and lead the engineering strategy across technical platforms, ensuring alignment with business priorities. Drive standardisation of practices, tooling, and frameworks across domains. Support enterprise-level architecture decisions to ensure scalability, maintainability, and a consistent approach to design and delivery while managing technical debt. Collaborate with Platform/Product, Architecture, and senior leaders to ensure alignment between standardised engineering practices and product roadmaps. Act as a steward of modern technologies, proactively identifying opportunities to leverage emerging innovations.
• Engineering Delivery & Operational Excellence: Lead the development of technical delivery practices aligned with Agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery principles. Drive accountability for engineering KPIs such as uptime, defect rate, and velocity across all platforms. Implement robust systems for incident management, reliability engineering, performance monitoring, observability, and telemetry, ensuring continuous improvement and proactive identification of potential issues. Ensure the adoption of automation to reduce operational overhead.
• Stakeholder Engagement & Influence: Act as a key advisor to the CIO, contributing to strategic decision-making at the highest levels. Work closely and collaboratively with the Banks’ Architecture practice ensuring alignment to broader strategic outcomes for business platforms and services. Engage with internal and external stakeholders, including vendors and partners, to influence the technology direction. Collaborate with external partners to influence and ensure engineering quality, aligning their contributions with BNZ’s goals and standards. Present complex technical information to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring clarity and alignment with business outcomes.
• Leadership of Engineering Communities: Provide leadership to Engineering Managers, Engineering Leads, and Senior Engineers/Developers to ensure engineering talent is nurtured and developed. Foster an inclusive, high-performance engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent. Mentor leaders across technology domains, promoting leadership excellence, technical rigor, and a collaborative mindset. Build and lead communities of practice across BNZ, driving thought leadership and technical consistency. Provide hands-on leadership in solving complex technical challenges, leveraging expertise to guide teams through critical issues. Be a visible and influential leader in the New Zealand engineering community, enhancing BNZ’s profile and attracting top talent.
• Risk Management & Governance: Oversee technical governance, ensuring compliance with internal standards and external regulatory requirements. Drive the adoption of technical standards around BNZ’s SDLC. Partner with cybersecurity to ensure security by design principles are embedded across engineering practices. Monitor and manage technical risks, with mitigation strategies aligned to delivery goals.
• Engineering Economics: Optimise engineering practices for cost efficiency. Develop cloud cost management strategies in collaboration with platform teams. Work within the bank’s build vs. buy decision frameworks, supporting the Bank’s largely COTs direction. Manage resource allocation and capacity planning in line with key outcomes that lift critical hygiene.
• People Leadership: Ensure awareness of responsibilities and expectations as a people leader. Manage team performance through regular performance conversations, providing employee recognition and feedback. Manage cost center, invoices, and team expenditure within plan. Support the ongoing development of your team by ensuring they have a robust development plan in place. Develop team engagement action plans for the year. Manage adherence to BNZ’s conduct, including management of team compliance and mandatory training.

What will success look like for the candidate in this role?

Success in this role will be demonstrated by effectively driving engineering excellence, strategic technical direction, and operational efficiencies across BNZ’s technology platforms. You will also be successful in promoting a culture of innovation and collaboration, ensuring systems are scalable, secure, resilient, and aligned with business outcomes.

What specific skills and experience would be beneficial for this role?

To be successful in this role, you will need 10+ years in technology leadership, including senior leadership roles with engineering oversight. You should have proven expertise in managing large-scale, complex technology platforms, and experience in engineering strategy definition and alignment. A strong understanding of cloud technologies, microservices, and DevOps practices is essential. You should also have extensive experience in reliability engineering, performance optimisation, system design, and architecture. An executive presence with the ability to influence at the C-suite level and with external partners is crucial.

What attributes will this person display in order to be successful in this tūranga?

To thrive in this role, you will need resilience and adaptability, maintaining focus under pressure. Strong influencing skills are essential, as is the ability to guide outcomes and foster collaboration without direct authority. Effective communication skills, both verbal and written, are crucial for in-person and virtual collaboration. Additionally, you should have strong problem-solving abilities, delivering practical solutions to engineering challenges.

Why BNZ?

At BNZ, we are passionate about serving customers brilliantly. We listen to understand customer needs, make banking simple and easy, and embrace new ideas and possibilities. We focus on long-term success and celebrate our wins. We connect the dots and work collaboratively, prioritising and making trade-offs aligned with our strategic ambition. We value belonging and wellbeing, ensuring our interactions are inclusive, empathetic, friendly, and helpful.

Nau Mai ki te Pēke o Aotearoa | Come to the Bank of New Zealand

Please note that due to the Christmas /Summer holiday period, applicants for this role will be contacted from 21 January 2025.

This is an exciting opportunity to join us!  We're bold thinkers who are taking brave steps to create a company that people want to work for, and customers want to bank with. If you're ready to join a fun organisation where we are proud of our culture and how we are helping New Zealander's to 'Find their way', then show your interest by submitting your application - we can't wait to read it. 

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini" - Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many.”