Technical Lead

About the Opportunity

Our client, a well-established and high-profile New Zealand organisation operating in a highly regulated, customer-facing industry (e.g. banking, financial services or healthcare), is looking for an experienced Technical Lead to join their Technology team in Auckland.

Both Contract and Permanent candidates will be considered.

The Role

As Technical Lead, you'll be the technical anchor of a development squad of 4-6 engineers, accountable for the architectural and technical integrity of everything the squad ships - whether hand-written or generated by AI agents. This is a hands-on role: you'll design, build and ship production software alongside the squad while directing AI-augmented development across the full spectrum, from AI-assisted coding to fully agent-generated builds. You'll act as the squad's software architect, keep both developers and AI coding agents on the rails through review, standards and guardrails, grow the squad's intermediate and junior engineers through deliberate mentoring, and be the Product Owner's primary technical advisor. This role carries no formal line management - your authority is technical, exercised through architecture, quality gates and coaching.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical design of squad deliverables, keeping work coherent, maintainable and aligned to agreed patterns
• Define and maintain the squad's definition of done and operate the technical quality gate for all human- and AI-authored work
• Keep developers on the rails through code review, pairing, coaching and clear engineering standards
• Direct AI coding agents across the full delivery spectrum, choosing the right mode for each piece of work
• Personally design, build and ship production code alongside the squad
• Lead root-cause analysis of defects and production incidents
• Mentor and grow intermediate and junior engineers through pairing, feedback and delegated responsibility

About You

• 8+ years' professional software development experience, including end-to-end delivery of production systems
• Demonstrated software architecture capability, designing and evolving systems under delivery pressure
• Demonstrated capability orchestrating AI coding agents and assistants (e.g. Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot)
• Expert-level debugging and root-cause analysis, including in unfamiliar codebases
• Strong platform knowledge across major cloud providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, Cloudflare)
• Security-by-design mindset
• A track record of mentoring and growing intermediate and junior engineers
• Experience in a highly regulated industry (e.g. banking, financial services or healthcare) would be an advantage

If this sounds like your next move, apply now or get in touch for a confidential conversation.