Principal Engineer

Mō te tūranga | About the Role
The Principal Engineer - Cards is a senior enterprise technical leader responsible for shaping technology strategy, target architecture and engineering direction across the Cards domain.
The role combines deep technical expertise, strategic thinking and practical delivery experience to ensure technology decisions support customer outcomes, business priorities, operational resilience and the organisation's long-term technology objectives.
Working across engineering teams, architecture, product, service and business functions, the Principal Engineer provides authoritative technical leadership, resolves complex cross-domain challenges and drives engineering excellence at scale. The role influences enterprise standards, develops engineering capability and ensures solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, maintainable and aligned with current and future organisational needs.
Within the Cards domain, the Principal Engineer serves as the senior technical authority for the Cards Management Platform and associated card issuing ecosystem. The role is responsible for driving the target architecture, engineering standards, integration strategy, resilience and long-term technology roadmap supporting card issuance, servicing, authentication, digital wallets, card controls, scheme integration and customer-facing card capabilities.
The Principal Engineer ensures the Cards platform evolves to support future business growth, regulatory requirements, operational resilience and customer experience objectives.
Strategic Technology Leadership
Define and drive the technology strategy, target architecture and engineering roadmap for the Cards domain.
Provide authoritative technical leadership across multiple squads, services, platforms and complex programmes of work.
Translate business strategy and customer needs into clear technology direction, architectural decisions and executable engineering outcomes.
Lead the design of secure, resilient, scalable and maintainable solutions that align with enterprise architecture and industry good practice.
Make and influence significant technical decisions, clearly communicating options, risks, trade-offs and long-term implications.
Identify opportunities to create organisation-wide value through technology simplification, reuse, automation and improved engineering practices.
Ensure technology investments and engineering decisions progressively move the organisation towards its agreed target architecture.
Cards Domain Leadership
Own the technical vision, target architecture and engineering roadmap for the Cards domain.
Provide technical leadership across the end-to-end Cards ecosystem, ensuring solutions align with business strategy, customer outcomes and architectural principles.
Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns and technical guardrails for card issuing, servicing and payments capabilities.
Act as the senior technical escalation point for significant Cards domain decisions, risks and complex engineering challenges.
Ensure technology decisions balance delivery outcomes, customer experience, resilience, maintainability and long-term strategic value.
Drive alignment across Product, Technology, Architecture, Risk and Operations stakeholders.
Cards Platform Architecture
Define and govern the architecture supporting: Card lifecycle managementCard issuing and servicingCredit and debit card productsDigital walletsAuthentication and card security servicesCustomer servicing capabilitiesProduct configuration and managementScheme integrationsFraud and risk controls
Lead architecture and design decisions relating to APIs, events, integration patterns and data flows across the Cards ecosystem.
Drive simplification and standardisation of technology patterns across Cards services and platforms.
Ensure consistency and reuse of capabilities, services, data models and integration approaches.
Define architecture principles supporting scalability, resilience, security, operability and future growth.
Engineering Excellence
Establish and champion engineering principles, standards, patterns, controls and reusable approaches across the Cards domain.
Influence enterprise policies and governance frameworks to ensure they remain practical, proportionate and future-focused.
Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including automation, CI/CD, observability, testing and AI-assisted engineering.
Develop engineering roadmaps to improve reliability, performance, maintainability and delivery effectiveness.
Promote engineering excellence through simplification, automation and continuous improvement.
Operational Resilience & Risk
Define and champion resilience, recovery, observability and operational excellence standards across the Cards domain.
Provide technical oversight for strategically important initiatives and ensure risks, dependencies and non-functional requirements are actively managed.
Lead technical response and decision-making during significant incidents, systemic failures or emerging technology risks.
Identify, prioritise and influence the reduction of technical debt, legacy complexity and operational risk.
Ensure architecture and engineering decisions appropriately balance customer outcomes, operational risk and regulatory obligations.
Drive continuous improvement through incident reviews, lessons learned and resilience engineering practices.
Vendor & Strategic Partnerships
Partner with vendors and strategic technology providers to influence roadmaps, resolve complex issues and achieve sustainable outcomes.
Evaluate platform capabilities, technical roadmaps and architectural options.
Influence technical outcomes and roadmap priorities to align with organisational objectives.
Ensure solutions maximise standard platform capabilities and minimise unnecessary complexity or customisation.
Build trusted relationships with senior Technology, Product, Risk and Business stakeholders.
Engineering Community & Capability Growth
Build and strengthen the engineering community through technical leadership, coaching, mentoring and knowledge sharing.
Develop Lead Engineers, Senior Engineers and emerging technical leaders.
Foster an inclusive, collaborative and high-performing engineering culture.
Create opportunities for professional and technical growth across the engineering community.
Balance strategic leadership with sufficient involvement in technical design and delivery to maintain practical understanding and technical credibility.
Nā tāu rourou | What will you bring?
Essential
Extensive experience in Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Architecture or another relevant technology discipline.
Demonstrated experience providing strategic technical leadership across large, complex and interconnected technology environments.
Deep expertise in Cards, Payments, Issuing or Transaction Processing environments.
Strong understanding of card lifecycle management, card issuing and customer servicing capabilities.
Demonstrated experience implementing, integrating or operating enterprise card management and issuing platforms.
Proven ability to define technology strategy, target architecture, engineering roadmaps and long-term technical direction.
Strong architectural capability connecting business strategy, solution design, engineering execution and operational outcomes.
Significant experience designing and delivering secure, resilient, scalable and maintainable enterprise technology solutions.
Demonstrated experience influencing engineering decisions, standards and practices across multiple teams and organisational areas.
Strong understanding of modern engineering practices including cloud, DevOps, automation, observability, CI/CD, testing and operational resilience.
Strong knowledge of payments ecosystems, card scheme integrations and card processing flows.
Proven experience leading complex platform implementations involving multiple squads, vendors and stakeholders.
Strong mentoring and coaching capability with experience developing senior engineers and technical leaders.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical matters to technical and non-technical audiences.
Deep Expertise In
Card Issuing
Card Lifecycle Management
Customer Card Servicing
Credit and Debit Card Products
Authentication and Authorisation
Digital Wallets
Tokenisation
EMV Standards
ISO8583 Messaging
Mastercard and Visa ecosystems
PCI DSS
Fraud Controls
API-led Integration
Event-Driven Architecture
Distributed Systems
High Availability Platforms
Resilience Engineering
Preferred
Experience working within a large, complex enterprise or highly regulated environment.
Experience leading large-scale Cards transformation programmes.
Experience establishing or contributing to engineering standards, architecture frameworks, communities of practice or centres of excellence.
Experience working with configurable vendor-based platforms.
Experience supporting digital card capabilities, wallet integrations and tokenisation services.
Experience with AI-enabled engineerin