CND Systems Engineer (Cloud and Microservices) at Government Communications Security Bureau, Wellington

Mō tēnei tūranga mahi | About this role

Are you inspired by protecting New Zealand?

Looking for a role where your expertise will be highly valued?

Join our diverse and talented people and work at the heart of national security, providing essential intelligence to the NZ government to protect New Zealand and its people.

About us

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s cyber defence. We fulfil the cyber security responsibilities of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) | Te Tira Tiaki, and provide cyber security services to all New Zealanders – from individuals and small businesses and organisations up to large enterprises, government, and critical national infrastructure.

The role

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Cloud & Microservices Engineer to design, build and manage our enterprise Cloud, Microservices and Linux platforms. In this critical role, you’ll be at the forefront of enhancing GCSB’s capability to detect, disrupt, and deter sophisticated cyber threats facing New Zealand—contributing to the security of our nation.

Our work may be classified, but the secret to our success isn’t—it’s our people. Our engineers are the backbone of ground breaking cyber security solutions that have earned national acclaim, including the 2023 Public Service Commission's Spirit of Service Award for Service Excellence, the Prime Minister's Award, and the 2022 iSANZ Award for Best New Zealand Security Product or Service.

This is your opportunity to be part of a high performing team of CND Systems Engineers. The mission is vital and the challenge is unlike anything else.

Your key responsibilities

• Technical Leadership
• Design, build and manage enterprise Cloud and Linux platforms as the Subject Matter Experience
• Champion industry best practices and frameworks into engineered solutions
• Coach and Mentor Engineers
• Relationship Management & Stakeholder Engagement

Who we're looking for

You’ll be instrumental in delivering enterprise systems by being the subject matter expert, applying industry best practices and frameworks, driving automation initiatives, mentoring team members, and supporting end-to-end project execution and day-to-day operations.

To achieve this, you will be proactive and enthusiastic with strong relationship management skills and the ability to navigate complexity with confidence.

You will ideally bring:

• 5+ years’ experience as a SME in designing, building and operating Cloud and Microservices platforms.
• Experience defining and maintaining cloud platform standards (networking, IAM, account/subscription structure, landing zones, tagging, logging, encryption) to enable consistent delivery across teams.
• Experience evolving reference architectures for common workload types (web apps, APIs, batch jobs, event-driven systems, data workloads), balancing reliability, cost, and security.
• Experience establishing cloud governance guardrails that scale (policy-as-code, baseline controls, compliance reporting, exception workflows).
• Manage cloud cost with FinOps (cost allocation model, chargeback/showback, optimisation roadmap).
• Implementing change management practices for critical cloud components (maintenance windows, rollback strategies, change records where required).
• Experience in continuously reducing manual effort through automation of provisioning, patching, scaling, certificate rotation, and routine operational tasks.
• Experience implementing identity and access management patterns (least privilege, role-based access, service principals/roles, short-lived credentials, privileged access workflows).
• Experience building and maintaining IaC modules and deployment templates (e.g., Terraform modules, cloud-native templates), including versioning and testing practices.
• Experience building CI/CD primitives and templates (pipelines, reusable workflows, policy checks, artifact promotion patterns).
• Enabling container and orchestration platforms
• Experience implementing observability foundations (central logging, metrics, tracing standards, correlation IDs, audit logging, retention policies).
• Experience engineering security baseline controls (encryption, key management, secrets management, vulnerability scanning).
• Enabling scalable data and storage services (object storage lifecycle, backup policies, DR replication patterns, performance tuning).
• Implementing policy enforcement mechanisms (e.g., guardrails using cloud policies, admission controls, CI checks) and manage exceptions with documented risk acceptance.
• Experience maintaining documentation quality for cloud standards, patterns, and runbooks; ensuring documentation is actionable and kept current.

The appointment range for this role is $120,359 - $128,383.

Why work for us

Alongside getting to work with other talented people, we also offer a range of comprehensive benefits which include:

• Medical insurance and vision care packages
• Enhanced employer contributions to your Kiwisaver
• Generous leave benefits, including additional paid days off and enhanced sick and parental leave
• Childcare allowance for your pre-schoolers
• Opportunities for personal and professional growth and career pathways across the intelligence community
• Great work-life balance

Before you apply

Working within our unique environment means we must ensure you’re eligible for employment. You must:

• Have been a New Zealand Citizen for at least 10 years
  OR
  Hold a current NZ Residency Class visa and ideally have been a citizen of the UK, USA, Canada or Australia for at least 10 years
• Be eligible to obtain a Top Secret Special (TSS) clearance
• Ordinarily this means you will have a 15-year checkable background in countries NZSIS Vetting can make meaningful and reliable checks

Still unsure? Use this online tool to self-check your eligibility for a TSS security clearance: http://www.protectivesecurity.govt.nz/eligibility-tool

The NZIC treats all applications for employment in the strictest confidence and we expect that you maintain a similar level of confidentiality during the recruitment process and throughout your career.

We'll provide you with information and tips throughout the recruitment process, but in the meantime check out some of our Security FAQs here The security clearance process | Beyond Ordinary Careers

You can also learn more about our work and understand our areas of focus by reading New Zealand's Security Threat Environment | New Zealand Security Intelligence Service