About this role

This is a player-coach role: you'll own the architectural vision while still rolling up your sleeves and contributing code. You'll work alongside our Product Manager as peers, one owning the "what" (roadmap, priorities, outcomes), the other owning the "how" (architecture, standards, technical excellence). Both report to the CTO.

This isn't a management-heavy role. We need someone who wants to build, not just direct.

You'll be working with a team of 8+ external developers and QAs through our delivery partner, shaping how we modernise KiwiCloud and consolidate data from multiple sources (including E-Brida and LIMS) into a unified platform.

The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on engineering, ensuring our applications, data pipelines, and infrastructure evolve to meet future organisational needs, enable advanced analytics, and accelerate delivery through modern development practices, including AI-assisted tooling.

• Own system architecture across web, mobile, APIs, data platform, analytics/ML integrations, and security/compliance.
• Translate business and research needs into clear technical designs, roadmaps, and vendor work packages.
• AI strategy, help define how machine learning and AI agents transform breeding decisions and data access.
• Co-Lead RFPs/vendor selection, technical due diligence, and govern delivery with design reviews, quality gates, and cost controls.
• Be hands-on where it counts: review PRs/designs, build proofs of concept, set up CI/CD, automate tests, and unblock tricky issues.
• Define data strategy: data modelling, pipelines, orchestration, quality/lineage, and governance for SQL and data warehouse workloads.
• Establish observability (logging, tracing, metrics), SRE practices, DevOps, and privacy-by-design.
• Partner with stakeholders (product, science, operations) and communicate trade-offs clearly and kindly.
• Champion engineering culture: documentation, mentoring, rituals, and continuous improvement.
• Evaluate and embed AI-assisted development tools across the delivery lifecycle: code generation, API scaffolding, test automation, and rapid prototyping.
• Translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders, breeders, scientists, operations, and leadership

Key challenges for this role

• Unifying a fragmented data landscape. Critical breeding and trial data is distributed across multiple systems (E-Brida, LIMS, KiwiCloud, and others) with inconsistent models, limited integration, and no single source of truth. You'll need to chart a pragmatic path toward coherence without halting ongoing operations or research.
• Managing long time horizons. Kiwifruit breeding trials span 7-15+ years. Data captured today must remain interpretable and trustworthy decades from now. This creates architectural constraints around schema evolution, data lineage, and system longevity that differ significantly from typical commercial software contexts.
• Building internal technical leadership. KBC has historically operated through trusted delivery partners who have provided valuable technical direction. This role establishes dedicated in-house architectural ownership - bringing continuity of vision, deeper organisational context, and the capacity to think across systems and time horizons in ways that complement our partners' delivery expertise.
• Driving transformation while maintaining delivery. KiwiCloud and supporting systems must continue serving current users while undergoing significant modernisation. You'll balance the urgency of technical debt remediation against the reality that research and operations cannot pause for a rebuild.