Worker Type:

Permanent

Here at BNZ, it's about more than just banking. We work together in an agile, energising environment to create innovative solutions through our promise "If you can imagine a better future, let's find a way."

We support wellbeing, flexible working and have a generous leave offering. There is the opportunity for growth, learning and career development. No two days are the same.

The Event Management Dojo (EMD) have a mission to enable resilient, sustainable, and loosely coupled event streaming services at BNZ. In EMD you will be part of transforming how data flows through the bank.

We need a Senior Technical Specialist who will help run, operate, and develop automation for our multi-cloud Confluent Kafka infrastructure. Kafka is a high profile and in demand service at BNZ. It is critical to projects, processes, and the technology transformation within the bank.

EMD is part of the Engineering Product domain and the Core Systems business unit. We maintain and develop golden paths and several associated integration and deployment services for BNZ engineers. These are all in the pursuit of making BNZ a simpler place to work for our Engineers.

The role offers experience working across AWS, Azure, and on premise data centres. It involves working with a number of modern tools and technologies such as Kafka, Terraform, Ansible, TypeScript, and more. There’s also space to innovate and help shape modern data product, modern integration, and standardised data streaming patterns. When we’re successful, our work will save Engineers across BNZ years of effort.

We offer amazing benefits including a generous leave allowance, flexible working, banking benefits, health insurance and we have a focus on wellbeing.

Mō te Tūranga | About the Role

We sat down with the People Leader (who you would report to) and they told us the following about the role:

This role can be based in Auckland or Wellington. It is a hybrid role with two days where you can work flexibly.

What are 5 day to day tasks the person in this role will complete?

• Making automation code changes, and applying those changes to upgrade our Kafka environments.
• Making automation code changes to validate client configurations.
• Responding to incidents when issues with the platform arise (infrequent, we’ve had 99.998% uptime this year).
• Helping Engineers on the community channels learn about Kafka concepts.
• Contributing code changes and documentation to our golden paths (recipes) that help Engineers quickly learn and start to use Kafka.

What projects / work will the candidate be working on now and into the next year?

• Planned Kafka minor, and major version upgrades.
• Improving the linter to validate client topics and schema configuration.
• Improving and standardising alerting and monitoring of Kafka to ensure applications can get alarms when their apps have issues producing and consuming to Kafka.

What is the most challenging thing about this opportunity?

The ideal candidate will be autonomous, comfortable with uncertainty, and both patient and empathetic to engineers learning how to work with products like Kafka.

What technical skills are REQUIRED for this role?

• Automation and Scripting: Your expertise in this area is essential. We need someone that can help simplify and future proof our current solution.
• Unix Administration: Proficiency in Unix is a must. Your skills in managing and optimising these environments are crucial to our success. 
• Ansible and Terraform: while not mandatory, experience with these tools is highly preferred.
• Cloud platforms: Familiarity with AWS and Azure will be beneficial.
• Kafka: Familiarity with Kafka concepts will be beneficial.
• MQ: Familiarity with IBM MQ is a bonus.
• Collaboration: Strong interpersonal skills to work effectively within a cross functional, diverse, and multidisciplinary team. And, work effectively with engineers outside the team.

What do we want you to know before you apply?

Once you are up and running, rostered on call hours are part of the role.

What is your favourite thing about working for BNZ?

• High trust and autonomy environment.
• Solving enterprise level problems, rather small scoped scenarios.

Why did the last person leave this role?

Family and personal reasons.

What attributes will this person display in order to be successful in this role?

To be successful here at BNZ, we must all practice our BNZ values - not just profess them; “Own It”, “Grow together”, Be Respectful” and “Excellence for Customers”.

PLEASE NOTE: For internal reference, this role is Hay level 16.

Applications close at 11:59pm, Sunday 19 January 2025. The team will not be reviewing applications until after 13 January 2025.

Nau Mai ki te Pēke o Aotearoa | Come to the Bank of New Zealand

This is an exciting opportunity to join us!  We're bold thinkers who are taking brave steps to create a company that people want to work for, and customers want to bank with. If you're ready to join a fun organisation where we are proud of our culture and how we are helping New Zealander's to 'Find their way', then show your interest by submitting your application - we can't wait to read it. 

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini" - Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many.”

Closing Date: 19 January 2025