Staff Engineer

The What

You’re not looking for another “Senior Engineer” role with a bigger title and the same scope.
You’re looking for architectural influence, real ownership, and problems that are actually worth solving.

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer — someone who thinks in systems, reduces entropy, and shapes the technical direction of meaningful parts of our platform.

The problems here are open-ended and cross-team. They sit at the intersection of distributed systems, data, security, performance and commercial reality. 

You’ll operate across a large engineering group, deep technical domains, and long-term platform evolution.

What This Role Really Is

You’re the engineer others go to when something feels structurally off.

You:

• Spot architectural drift before it hardens into tech debt
• Anticipate scale and performance bottlenecks
• Simplify complex systems and reduce cognitive load
• Translate business requirements into durable, maintainable solutions
  
  

There’s genuine end-to-end ownership here — from ideation and architecture through to production, observability and operational support.

The Work

This isn’t ticket execution. It’s system stewardship.

You’ll:

• Design clean, evolvable architecture aligned with product strategy
• Decompose ambiguous initiatives into well-scoped, incremental delivery
• Review code and design deeply, raising engineering standards
• Surface security, reliability and performance risks early
• Strengthen business-critical systems with measurable impact
• Coach engineers on domain-driven-design thinking, trade-offs and engineering judgement

You’ll still ship high-quality software. But more importantly, you’ll influence how software is designed and delivered across teams.

You’ll contribute to technical strategy, participate in guilds, support hiring conversations, and help align engineering practices across the wider group.

The Stack

Our ecosystem includes:

• C#, ASP.NET, .NET Core
• NodeJS services, React Frontends
• Entity Framework and other ORMs
• MS SQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB
• REST APIs and GraphQL
• Messaging/Eventing (RabbitMQ, SQS, Kinesis)
• Microservices and distributed systems, instrumented with OTel
• AWS infrastructure
• AI services underpinned by Claude, Bedrock, and Langfuse

You don’t need to be an expert with every tool on day one. But you should be comfortable architecting distributed systems, reasoning about trade-offs at scale, and making pragmatic design decisions.

Why You Should Care

You’ll have real scope to:

• Shape platform architecture
• Tackle meaningful security and compliance challenges
• Improve scalability, resilience and performance
• Work across teams on complex, high-impact initiatives
• Influence long-term technology strategy
  
  

If you’re the kind of engineer who:

• Solves structural flaws before they cause incidents
• Leaves systems simpler than you found them
• Raises the capability of the engineers around you
• Enjoys solving hard problems properly

This will resonate.

If you’re already operating at Staff level, or know you’re ready for it, let’s talk. 

About us

Pushpay is an innovative New Zealand-born SaaS business that is spread between offices in Auckland, NZ and the United States. We help organisations like churches and charities build communities and stay connected through our industry-leading suite of mobile apps, church management software and digital giving technology. 

We love our culture. If you join us, you’ll discover how we foster mutual respect, innovation, brainstorming, blameless postmortems, brainfood learning sessions, and recognition for your accomplishments and impact on our product. You will be heard, your opinion understood, your input valued, and your knowledge respected as you work with a team of high-calibre people with a drive to do-it-well.

Benefits

We have a passion for making all employees feel supported. In addition to having a genuine interest in helping you do your best work and drive your career, we offer:

• Training: $3,000 annual training/conference allowance for your personal development
• Hybrid Work Model: We aim to offer a healthy work/life balance with flexible hours and the option to work from home 2 days a week
• Kiwisaver
• Parental Leave: Our paid parental leave policy offers primary & secondary caregiver leave, and we also have no leave override for those returning to work after parental leave, meaning you'll be paid at your full rate for annual holidays. 
• Sick Leave: You'll automatically get 10 days sick leave per year upon starting (no 6 month wait period!)
• State-of-the-art hardware and engineering tools
• Healthy food & drink options
• Free annual flu shots
• Fun on and offsite social events and Friday in-office happy hour
• Volunteering options through our employee-led Pushpay Cares program

Please apply with a comprehensive CV that highlights the systems you’ve shaped, the complexity you’ve handled, and the impact you’ve delivered.

Please note: To be considered for this vacancy you must have valid work rights for NZ