Principal Engineer

Jora New Zealand will close on 9th September 2026. Thank you for being with us, we are cheering you on as you continue your career journey. Writer's Toolbox is a market leader in the education sector. Winner of the 2023 NZ Hi-Tech Award for the most innovative hi-tech creative technology solution, our team delivers writing improvement programmes to hundreds of schools globally. Our flagship product is an online writing tool that is powered by the most advanced Educational AI on the planet and research proven to achieve optimal writing capabilities across all levels of schooling. If SLT has ever pushed you toward management, but you got sick of it, or just didn't like being away from the tech, then please read on. \"Thought leadership\" as in you are up to date on what the industry is doing right now, and have a feel for where it is going in the future. If you wouldn't describe yourself as \"passionate,\" then you would certainly say you are \"strongly opinionated\" about technology and how things should be built. While you will not have any direct reports, you will be a mentor for the more junior devs, and you will have significant influence on the technical direction of the company. \"Hands-on\" as in most of your day will be filled with hands-on keyboard coding, designing, or investigating. There will be the occasional agile ceremony, architecture discussion, or investigation, but 75%-90% will be coding. \"High agency\" as in you will report directly to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). More often than not, you will be given a high level problem with concrete objectives and a timeline and you will asked to design a solution. You will work closely with the CTO and the other Principal Engineer to decide which parts of that solution should be built into the platform/foundational stack. You will have free reign to deliver it, using the right tool for the right job. You will also be a key contributor to the vision and build of those platforms and foundational tech. About you A \"passion for technology.\" You enjoy talking about it, sharing your opinions, and mentoring others. Able to work with minimal direction. You are comfortable being given a set of objectives and requirements and can develop a solution that meets them. ~10+ years in the industry, working with a wide variety of tools and roles. A team player. You understand there may not be time to do things perfectly and can strike a balance when necessary. Skills Programming: Our infrastructure and platform code is primarily written in terraform, bash, python, and Go. Our core SaaS product is a React/PHP monolith, but we hope to migrate it to Go as well (see below). With that said, you should have a lot of experience with at least one language, either one of these, or one where your experience can easily translate. We are not looking for a PrincipalSoftwareEngineer, but a generalist. You should have the skills to learn and contribute to any of our codebases if you had to, and you should have the experience to do so effectively, even if it is not written in your primary language. Cloud: Each cloud has an equivalent service offering, so which cloud you have a lot of experience with is not as important as the fact that you do have a lot of experience with at least one. You should come to the table with ideas for how to manage access, monitor workloads, efficiently audit, and enable detailed cost reporting for a currently small, but soon to be globally distributed team(s). Infrastructure as code: We mostly use Terraform, but we believe in \"right tool for the right job.\" Ideally, you avoid ClickOps like the plague and have walked a few miles avoiding it. You come to the table with ideas to improve our IaC workflow, but also how enable other teams to do the same Kubernetes: specifically, we use AWS EKS, but ideally you have had a good deal of experience both managing workloads on a cluster, but also how to enable others who need to manage their own workloads on a cluster. This includes things like permission, data/volume, resource, and network management. DevOps: Since you will help set up these tools (and therefore the processes for using and interacting them), you should know what a really good developer experience is like, and ideally what a bad one is like too so you can steer us in the other direction. Event-driven microservices: Our long term roadmap includes breaking up the monolith. If you have ever done this before, or know some \"in the weeds\" details about how to efficiently maintain a Kafka cluster, or best practices when writing & implementing event-driven code, please consider applying. Databases: Any level of database experience is good, but if you know nitty-gritty details about how to optimise a MySQL database (in terms of efficiency and cost) for its intended workload, and how to efficiently carry out regular maintenance activities, this could shadow any shortcomings you have in the other job requirements. What we offer A competitive remuneration package, including free health insurance A conveniently located Head Office in Epsom with ample free street parking around A friendly office environment with fruit and monthly lunch shouts Flexible working approach, including up to two days WFH per week (after an initial 2-3 month period of training and induction) The chance to join a purpose-driven and talented team who love what we do! A competitive salary is offered, dependent on expertise and experience. #J-18808-Ljbffr