Senior Software Engineer (Product & AI Workflows)

YoungShand New Zealand
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We're looking for a pragmatic Senior Developer who understands that the "how" of software engineering is changing fast. You've got deep foundations in traditional computer science and design patterns, and you've fully embraced modern AI-augmented workflows (Cursor, Copilot, LLM-based refactoring) to ship high-quality code at pace. This isn't a syntax-writing job. You'll be architecting solutions, protecting system integrity, and using AI to handle the solved problems so you can spend your brainpower on the interesting stuff, think complex business logic, user experience, and the ideas nobody's tried yet. We know a lot of senior devs are (rightly) skeptical of "AI-first" job ads, often they're code for "we want cheap, fast, and disposable." That's not us. We want senior people who use these tools to be more creative and more strategic, not less. You'll be trusted with real architectural decisions from day one. We just need someone to hit the ground running in this type of workflow.

What you'll do• Architect for the long haul. Design and maintain scalable, deterministic systems. • Use AI as a force multiplier. Accelerate scaffolding, testing, and docs with AI assistants, while keeping a firm hand on quality, security, and intent. • Raise the bar. Run thoughtful code reviews that catch technical debt before it compounds, whether the code came from a human or a model. • Translate ambiguity into shipped products. Turn fuzzy business problems into technical specs, and know when a classical approach beats an AI-integrated one (and vice versa).

Here's the honest bit: we're an agency, which means you won't be living in a single pristine monorepo. We maintain hundreds of websites built over the past 10+ years, across a genuinely wide range of tech stacks, some shiny and modern, some with real character (and real lessons baked into them). These aren't forgotten projects either. They belong to clients we've built long, trusted relationships with, and they get the same care and craftsmanship as anything brand new walking in the door. The senior devs on our team can move between a legacy PHP build in the morning and a greenfield Next.js project in the afternoon without losing a step, and they genuinely enjoy the range. If context-switching energises you rather than drains you, you'll fit right in.