Kia ora!
At Air New Zealand, we’re reimagining how technology powers our journey, building platforms that enable innovation, speed, and resilience at scale. Our multi-cloud strategy across AWS and Azure is the backbone of our digital transformation, helping us modernise systems, automate workflows, and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and teams.
As we continue this evolution, we’re looking for a Chapter Lead – Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to provide strategic leadership and technical excellence within our Platform Engineering space. This is a unique opportunity to shape how we build, operate, and scale reliable, high-performing systems across the airline, while empowering talented engineers to grow and succeed.
You’ll lead a community of skilled SREs, fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement. Your leadership will ensure our platforms are designed for productivity, resilience, observability, and performance, while your technical acumen will guide Air New Zealand’s digital future.
The Role You’ll Play
As a Chapter Lead – SRE, you will:
- Provide strategic and people leadership across the SRE Chapter, developing technical capability and supporting career growth.
- Set direction and best practices for reliability engineering, automation, and operational excellence.
- Champion a culture of continuous improvement, using data and metrics to enhance system reliability and customer experience.
- Partner with Product, Security, and Architecture leaders to align reliability goals with business and platform strategy.
- Drive adoption of platform thinking, Infrastructure as Code, continuous delivery, observability, and service-level objectives across engineering teams.
- Lead cross-functional reliability initiatives that improve availability, scalability, and performance.
- Balance hands-on technical engagement with coaching and mentoring to build strong, empowered teams.
What You’ll Bring
- Proven leadership experience within a Site Reliability, Platform, or Software Engineering environment.
- Strong technical expertise in deployment pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS or Azure), Kubernetes, Terraform, automation, and observability tooling.
- A track record of leading and growing engineering teams through mentoring, coaching, and technical excellence.
- Deep understanding of the principles of internal self-service platforms, continuous delivery, and resilience.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to bridge technical and business priorities.
- A growth mindset, fostering inclusion, innovation, and continuous improvement within your teams.
If you meet the majority of the criteria and are excited by the opportunity, we’d love to hear from you.
What’s in it for you
We want our people to live their best lives and access great benefits that support their lives outside work, including:
- Discounted flights for you and your whānau.
- Flexile Leave that lets you purchase up to four extra weeks off each year.
- Access to medical cover options and wellbeing resources, including our Employee Assistance Programme.
- A learning culture that supports your next step, not just your current role.
- Generous parental leave and superannuation contributions.
Ready for Take-off?
If you’re ready to apply your leadership, technical expertise, and strategic thinking to shape the next chapter of Air New Zealand’s reliability engineering journey, we’d love to hear from you. Join us and help define what exceptional reliability leadership looks like at Air New Zealand.
At Air New Zealand, we are proudly committed to diversity, equity and inclusion and believe in creating a truly inclusive workplace where everyone can be themselves and thrive. Our people are our greatest asset – because while everything else we do in our operation can be replicated by our competitors, it is our people that truly set us apart. We are firm believers in celebrating the differences and diversity of thought our people bring to their roles. We encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds, including those with a disability, additional health and mental health needs, and/or are neurodiverse to apply for our roles.
If you have encountered any accessibility barriers and require further information or reasonable accommodations to our recruitment process, please reach out to the recruiter listed on this job advert so they are able to support you to freely participate equitably in our recruitment and selection process.
Whāia te pae tawhiti kia tata. Ko te pae tata whakamaua, kia tina.
"Seek to bring distant horizons closer. Once near, seize them and make them your reality."
Top Skills
What We Do
Kia Ora, Ni Hao, Gidday, konnichiwa, Talofa, Bula, Hello and Welcome to Air New Zealand, your journey starts here.
Air New Zealand is one of the world's leading airlines, known around the world, not just for our name and our innovation but also for our reputation. We are recognised as "New Zealand's Most Reputable Organisation" for our strong leadership, customer service orientation, innovation, brand, corporate values, and our role as a strong ambassador for New Zealand. Each year we make sure our passengers who fly to, from and within New Zealand enjoy our uniquely Kiwi way of doing things.
At Air New Zealand, we are all about people. Ambitious, helpful, proud, down-to-earth, caring people, who look after the needs of more than 13 million people every year. We look at ways of making the experience better for our customers and allowing people to experience our New Zealand.
Our people drive us to be among the world's best, frequently winning awards in all aspects of our operations, testament to the Air New Zealanders living this culture daily, in the way they deliver customer experience. Whilst it's led from the top, it is delivered by thousands of people, constantly doing things that make a big difference!
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