Senior Software Engineer

About Airways:
Our people manage New Zealand's 30 million square kms of airspace, providing air traffic control, surveillance, communication, flight inspection, mapping, and airspace design services. We work with government, regulatory authorities, airlines, airports, and the general aviation community to ensure pilots, passengers and goods reach their destination - safely. At Airways, our values underpin all that we do. We value Safety, One Airways, Excellence and Success in all that we do.

Our organisation is made up of operational business groups that are supported by governance and corporate services functions. To learn more about our people and organisational structure, check out www.airways.co.nz/about.

About the Team:
The Technology business unit is responsible for the effective delivery, management and services of all technology disciplines within the air navigation services environment – engineering design, software design and development, technology architecture and infrastructure, asset management, installation and maintenance, technical training, workload planning, maintenance program development, project management, and logistics support.

A team of ten specialist software engineers developed and maintain our Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, located on the same campus with New Zealand’s main Air Traffic Control Centre, working in partnership with a large American manufacturer developing ATM systems for other countries. The team operate a flexible and pragmatic development process, supporting a scheduled ATM software release every eight weeks since 2003.

About the System:
Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) use an Air Traffic Management (ATM) system to control aviation traffic across the land mass and immediate surrounding airspace of New Zealand. Airways is one of the few Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) world-wide which supports the full engineering of its ATM systems in-house.

The ATM is a complex safety-critical distributed real-time system, requiring 24 hrs x 365 days availability. It consists of multiple application processes running on Linux VMs on hundreds of machines in ATC centres and towers across the country. The advanced requirement for resilience is met by numerous architectural features and by the thorough work of the software engineers supported by a robust software development process. The ATM includes a set of reconfigurable simulators, for controller training and operations procedure development.

In the past two decades we’ve had zero software rollbacks and only two releases deployed late (by 24 hours). The toolset includes Git, Gerrit, Redmine, Jenkins, Ansible, and multiple other tools. Development of a Kubernetes-based microservices architecture is taking place for some new services, and eventual possible migration of existing services.

A new generation of the ATM system went live in 2023. Throughout the lifetime of ATM systems, technological and operational change is unrelenting, requiring continual improvement and development of the system.

About the Role:
After a long-standing successful career at Airways, one of our software engineers will be retiring. This provides an opening for a Senior Software Engineer (Operating System and Infrastructure Software Customisation and Development) to join us on a full-time permanent basis at our Christchurch campus in Burnside.

The ATM runs on a Linux distribution customised to exclude unwanted content and include required content from outside the distribution, producing installation media from which any ATM machine can be built.

This role is ideal for a software engineer specialising in the implementation as mentioned above, and its deployment to the live ATM.

About You:
For success you will be proactive, self-motivated, be a team player, a fast learner and an experienced problem solver.

Additionally, you will hold:

• An honours or masters degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering, or a relevant degree with demonstratable equivalent experience
• Experience working in a software development team with a structured development environment
• Expertise in Linux and Ansible
• Expertise in Kubernetes-based microservices construction
• Experience with Git, Gerrit, Redmine, and Jenkins
• Experience with Bash scripting, C++, Java, Python
• A provable record of efficiently producing high quality designs, code, and documentation
• Ability to work in a dynamic business environment, influence and collaborate with people internally and externally, show resilience and agility, take ownership and focus on delivering successful business outcomes.

Beneficial:

• Experience in real-time, safety critical systems
• Experience with applying security including SE Linux.

About Our Offering:
Airways offers a competitive package inclusive of a solid base salary and a generous superannuation scheme with employer contributions of up to 11% of earnings (T&Cs). We also offer five (5) weeks annual leave, vast learning opportunities and career progression opportunities.

You will work on a system that is technically complex and very interesting. Additionally, you will work in close partnership with a dedicated team of controllers and pilots responsible for operational requirements and acceptance testing, and with system engineers, network engineers, and other specialist engineers supporting the multiple technologies employed.

You will see your software changes deployed regularly to the live Air Traffic Control system, for the immediate benefit of aviation traffic, air traffic controllers, and the technicians who monitor and control the system.

Airways is a great place to work, with an international reputation for innovation and success.

To Apply:
If you are ready to stretch yourself and assist Airways in building the aviation environment of the future, submit your application (CV and cover letter) via the Airways careers site or Seek.

Please note that you must be legally eligible to work in New Zealand to be considered.

This role will require the successful candidate to undergo pre-employment background checks including references, drug and alcohol screening, criminal conviction, and related checks.

Application closing date is Thursday, 13 March 2025.

At Airways, our people are at the heart of what we do to keep NZ skies safe. We are committed to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace where people feel they belong and can bring their whole self to work. We currently hold the Rainbow Tick and NQTick (neurodiversity) and are working towards Gender Tick. We make our recruitment decisions based on the best candidate for the job and therefore encourage applications from diverse candidates.