Site Reliability Engineer

New Zealand (remote) • Contract, full-time •

About the role

We’re looking for a Site Reliability Engineer in New Zealand to join the platform team of one of our established Australian technology clients. This is a hands-on infrastructure role on a fast-moving team that is part way through a significant move to cloud-native tooling, and they need an extra pair of capable hands to help carry that work over the line.

This starts as a six-month engagement focused on resource augmentation rather than a fully scoped project. You won’t be handed a greenfield brief and left alone. You’ll slot into a mostly senior internal team, pick up real work from day one, and help scale their capacity through a busy period of migration and uplift. There’s a good chance of extending if things go well.

The headline piece of work is migrating a self-managed Kubernetes cluster onto Amazon EKS, alongside moving self-hosted Kafka onto the Amazon managed service. The team works in Australian hours, so the time zone overlap with New Zealand makes for genuinely close collaboration.

What you’ll be doing

• Helping migrate a self-managed Kubernetes cluster onto Amazon EKS, including the awkward parts like persistent storage and stateful workloads.

• Managing and improving AWS infrastructure that is defined and maintained in Terraform.

• Supporting the move of self-hosted Kafka onto the Amazon managed service, with as little disruption as possible.

• Keeping the platform stable, observable and secure while it changes underneath you.

• Working shoulder to shoulder with a senior internal team, picking up work and running with it rather than waiting to be told each next step.

• Flagging risks early and leaving behind clear documentation so the team can maintain what you build.

What good looks like

The right person here has done real Kubernetes migration work before and knows where the bodies are buried. You’re comfortable in someone else’s infrastructure, you respect what’s already there, and you can move quickly without breaking the things that matter.

• Genuine hands-on EKS experience, not just clicking through a managed cluster. You understand the nuances, from persistent storage like EFS through to networking and version upgrades.

• Strong AWS, with Terraform as your day-to-day way of describing infrastructure.

• Comfortable taking legacy and self-hosted systems and moving them onto cloud-native, managed equivalents.

• Solid Kafka knowledge, ideally including a move to a managed service such as Amazon MSK.

• Mid-senior and mature with it. You bring a low-ego, collaborative style that fits well alongside an existing senior team.

• A clear communicator who can explain a trade-off to another engineer and get everyone on the same page.

Working with us

This is a New Zealand-based role and you can work remotely from anywhere in the country. The client and the wider team work in Australian hours, so a healthy daily overlap comes naturally and we won’t be asking you to keep unsociable hours.

You’ll be engaged through our New Zealand team, with the backing of an established UK business that has been setting up global software teams for nearly 15 years.

Compensation

This is a full-time contract role paying NZD 8,000 to 10,000 per month, depending on your experience and track record. The initial term is six months, with a good chance of extension.

Interested?

If this sounds like you, we’d love to talk. Send through your CV along with a short note on a migration or platform piece you’re proud of and the part you played in getting it over the line.