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Phocas is a profitable, growing SaaS company specializing in financial planning and analytics products. With nearly 300 employees globally and a Product & Technology team based in Christchurch, the company operates a multi-region AWS platform serving mid-market customers across the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia.
You will lead the platform team responsible for the availability, performance, security, and cost of the AWS infrastructure. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll own both strategic direction and operational execution.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading the platform team and setting technical standards for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and access control
- Managing AWS spend at scale through attribution, rightsizing, forecasting, and commitment planning
- Driving the team's adoption of AI tools and agentic workflows with appropriate governance
- Developing and executing a clear, sequenced roadmap aligned with company strategy
- Leading incident response and root cause analysis, with deep hands-on knowledge of the architecture
- Operating a mixed estate of Windows/IIS and self-managed SQL Server on EC2 alongside containerized services (ECS, Lambda, AWS Batch)
- Building a high-trust team and collaborating closely with Engineering Enablement and other neighboring teams
The platform serves established workloads alongside modern containerized and serverless services, requiring pragmatic decision-making about incremental modernization.
Phocas offers hybrid working with flexible hours, a spacious Christchurch office, 10% dedicated professional development time (one day per fortnight), Southern Cross health insurance, life and income protection, extra paid parental leave, and an AI-forward culture.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Extensive experience running large, complex platforms with several years leading teams
- Recent hands-on engineering experience in high-scale, 24/7 operations
- Deep AWS fundamentals: networking, compute, storage, resilience, capacity management, security (IAM, least-privilege design)
- Proven track record managing AWS costs at scale (attribution, forecasting, optimization)
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform/Terragrunt) and CI/CD pipelines
- Comfort operating mixed estates (Windows/IIS, self-managed SQL Server on EC2, ECS, Lambda, AWS Batch)
- Practical experience embedding AI tools into engineering or operations workflows
- Pragmatic, outcomes-focused approach with clear communication
- Current New Zealand working rights required (visa sponsorship not available)
- Bonus: familiarity with Terraform/Terragrunt + Atlantis, GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, Elastic, HashiCorp Vault
