Senior Developer

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.

Our Payments team builds and runs the technology that keeps money moving at BNZ. We're hiring a senior engineer who builds that software and owns proving it works.

Deliberately, this is not a build-only role with someone else picking up the testing downstream. You'll be involved from the first design conversation through to production support, and quality will be your concern at every one of those steps. We'd rather stop a defect at design time than find it in a test environment, and far rather find it in a test environment than at two in the morning on a payments cutoff.

Practically, that means some weeks you're writing Spring Boot services and arguing about integration patterns, and others you're building out an automation suite, profiling a service under load, or sitting down and exploring a payment journey by hand to find what the automation can't. We're after someone who sees all of that as one job rather than two, and who has the seniority to make the calls that come with it - what to build, what to automate, what risk is worth taking, and when to say the thing isn't ready.

This role can be based in Wellington or Auckland. It is a hybrid role with three days in the office and two where you can work flexibly.

Mō te Tūranga | About the Role We sat down with the People Leader who you will report to and they told us the following about the role:

What are the day-to-day tasks the person in this role will complete?

• Design and build quality solutions: Apply advanced engineering knowledge to design and develop robust, scalable and maintainable Spring Boot services and APIs (REST + SOAP) aligning with target state architecture, treating testability as a design constraint rather than something considered afterwards.
• Engineer for quality: Work out the test approach as the solution evolves, covering unit, integration, contract, API, regression, performance, and resilience testing. Recognise when hands-on exploratory testing will provide more valuable insights than additional automated checks, and proactively surface technical and quality risks while they are still inexpensive to address.
• Develop and maintain automated tests: Build checks that actually catch things, and look after the frameworks behind them (JUnit 5/Mockito, API automation, regression and stress suites) with the same care as the production code they guard.
• Analyse, investigate, and solve problems: Conduct upfront analysis to understand customer needs, business objectives, requirements, technical constraints, dependencies, and risks, helping shape the right solution from the outset. Work through ambiguity, validate assumptions, and collaborate with stakeholders to design scalable, high-quality features. When issues arise, reproduce complex defects, review logs and code, identify the true root cause, and implement robust fixes rather than simply patching symptoms.
• Support production: Share in production support and the on-call roster, keeping services healthy and responding well when they aren't.
• Collaborate and influence: Work alongside engineers, analysts, product owners and other stakeholders; mentor intermediate and graduate developers, review both code and tests, and lift the standard across the squad.

What is the team culture and environment like? We're a close team working on systems the whole bank depends on, which shapes how we operate. People own their work end to end, and when something breaks we look at what in the system allowed it rather than who typed the commit.

There's genuine pace here. Payments work comes with regulatory deadlines and industry dates that don't move, so there are stretches where we're pushing hard. We balance that by protecting time for learning and improvement, and by looking out for each other when a release cycle gets heavy - nobody is expected to be the single point of failure for anything, including themselves.

We deliberately build a team of different backgrounds and viewpoints, because payments problems are rarely solved by everyone thinking the same way. Whatever your path into engineering, if you do good work and bring others along with you, you'll do well here.

What experience is required for this role? The strongest candidates will bring a mix of development and quality engineering capability. We'd expect to see most of the following:

• Solid command of modern Java and Spring Boot, and the engineering practices that go with them
• Building and running enterprise RESTful services and event-driven architectures (Kafka, IBM MQ); SOAP familiarity helps given how much legacy we still carry
• API testing and automation, performance, load and resilience testing, including making sense of the numbers and doing something useful with them
• Sound judgement about manual and exploratory testing - what's worth automating, what's worth exploring, and how to tell the difference
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL / SQL, Gradle, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/ OpenShift, Jenkins/Spinnaker
• CI/CD and infrastructure tooling such as Jenkins, Spinnaker, Ansible and Terraform, including wiring quality gates into the pipeline
• Observability and monitoring with tools like Splunk and Dynatrace
• Exceptional analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills, ability to translate complex data into commercially pragmatic insights and recommendations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present complex concepts clearly to leadership and stakeholders.

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

• Real technical depth. You've spent long enough in production backend and integration work - usually 7+ years - to have strong opinions and to know when to hold them loosely.
• You finish things. Designing it, building it, testing it, shipping it and looking after it afterwards all feel like the same piece of work to you, not a handover chain.
• Quality is instinctive, not procedural. You're already thinking about how something will be verified while you're deciding how to build it, and you reach for automation without being asked to.
• You move between modes easily. Writing a service, extending a test framework, chasing a latency problem or working through a journey by hand - you'll pick up whichever one the team needs this week.
• You're comfortable when the problem is unclear. Vague requirements, odd production behaviour and conflicting evidence don't stall you; you work the problem until you understand it properly.
• You bring people with you. Engineers, analysts, product owners, operations - you build the relationships that get things done, and you make the people around you better.
• You keep improving things. You notice the slow build, the flaky suite, the manual step nobody questions anymore, and you do something about them.

PLEASE NOTE: Advertising for this position closes Tuesday 3 November at 11pm.

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

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."

Applications will be reviewed regularly across the advertising period, but we do reserve the right to close applications early.