Principal Engineer

About Appetise

Appetise is a meal-planning and intelligent grocery-shopping app used by more than 125,000 people across Australia and New Zealand to decide what to cook and find the lowest grocery prices across Woolworths, Coles, and other retailers. The app is free and will remain free. That usage also powers the largest food and beverage behavioural panel in ANZ, which is sold to more than 80 FMCG brands.

The company raised a $7M Series A in February 2026, led by Icehouse Ventures, appeared on the cover of Forbes earlier this year, and is now expanding beyond Australia and New Zealand. Engineering is central to that growth, building both the Shopper app that powers the panel and Appetise Intelligence, the B2B product brands use to interpret the data.

The company is a team of about 18 people across Christchurch and Sydney, with 8 engineers. The culture is low-ego, fast-moving, and focused on product impact and mutual respect. The codebase is compact enough that the work you deliver reaches customers quickly.

What the team offers

• Compensation of up to $180,000, depending on experience, plus eligibility for the ESOP scheme.
• Hybrid work from the Christchurch office, with Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday as anchor days. Remote work across New Zealand or Australia may be considered for the right person.
• Learning and development support tailored to what you actually want to learn, with a default bias toward yes.
• Lunch on Mondays, Treat Tuesdays, and quarterly in-person team days.

About the engineering team

The engineering group is small, experienced, and collaborative. Engineers own features from end to end, deploy to production several times a day, and work across multiple stacks and languages depending on the problem. The team makes heavy use of Claude Code and keeps process light so more time goes into building strong software alongside people they enjoy working with.

Role overview

This is a Principal Engineer position for someone who can bridge business goals and technical execution. As the company scales, poor translation between the two becomes costly, so this role is responsible for helping define the right technical solutions for customer problems, making architecture decisions, and keeping the data foundation dependable.

With AI coding tools producing more raw output, the main constraint is the thinking that happens before code is written. The company needs someone who can do that thinking well, bring others into the process, and keep the team focused on trade-offs and long-term quality.

This is a hands-on role with a high degree of trust, reporting to the Head of Engineering. It is the technical voice that engineering, product, and the founders rely on for clear direction.

What you will own

• Turning requirements into technical direction by working with product to translate vague business problems into well-defined engineering approaches.
• Owning architecture decisions and defending pragmatic choices that suit both the current stage and the future roadmap.
• Designing and building dependable data pipelines with testing and modelling built in from day one, supporting the insights product, ads platform, and LLM assistant.
• Ensuring AI outputs are correct and reliable by maintaining accurate, well-structured data, plus evaluation and quality checks for Radish and future AI features.
• Providing technical leadership and stakeholder communication so the team and founders have a seasoned, trustworthy point of contact.

The workload is roughly split across pipeline and data foundations (25–30%), architecture and domain ownership (20–25%), requirements translation and specification work (20–25%), AI infrastructure and correctness (15–20%), with the remainder focused on technical leadership and communication.

What the company is looking for

• At least 10 years of software engineering experience with genuine ownership of technical direction and architecture decisions.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to convert ambiguous problems into practical, buildable technical plans.
• Strong Python capability across the data engineering ecosystem, including ownership and improvement of production systems, scripts, and workflows.
• Deep hands-on experience building production data pipelines, including modelling and testing from the outset.
• Experience with cloud data warehouses and related tooling such as DAG orchestration, dbt transformations, and warehouse cost/performance tuning.
• Excellent SQL skills, including writing, tuning, and treating SQL as a core engineering skill.
• A strong cloud engineering background, preferably with AWS, and comfort with serverless, managed services, and production operations.
• Experience with event-driven and serverless systems such as SQS and Lambda, or equivalent technologies.
• Comfort working with upstream data sources from retailers and third-party providers, including stabilising unreliable inputs.
• Hands-on AI/LLM infrastructure experience, including evaluation design, data quality validation, and ensuring reliable model inputs; observability tools such as Langfuse are a plus.
• Broad technical range across languages and ecosystems, with good fundamentals that transfer; PHP experience is useful but not required.
• Practical use of Claude Code or a similar AI tool as a productivity multiplier, including careful prompting, critical review of outputs, and accountability for what ships.
• Current legal right to work in New Zealand.

What stands out in a strong candidate

• Experience building systems, seeing them fail, fixing them, and applying those lessons to future work.
• A clear understanding that specifications and data quality matter because the cost of getting them wrong has been felt firsthand.
• The ability to move smoothly from founder discussions to technical design documents without losing important context, and to know when speed is appropriate versus when deeper rigour is needed.
• Direct experience shipping AI-assisted product features, not only using AI to accelerate coding.

Nice to have

• Experience with Snowflake.
• Exposure to multi-tenant SaaS or platforms with both B2B and B2C surfaces.
• Previous experience in product-led startup environments.

Typical background that does well here

Senior or staff-level engineers from product-led startups who have owned data systems end to end and are equally comfortable working in the application layer.

Not the right fit if

• You need every problem to be fully defined before you can begin.
• You are highly specialised in only one layer and prefer to hand off the rest.
• You would rather design architecture than actively build and ship it.
• You are inclined to say “that’s not my job.”
• You want a large team, heavy processes, and a prewritten playbook.

Hiring process

This position will stay open until filled, and the company is aiming to move quickly for the right candidate.

• Initial conversation with the Head of Engineering.
• In-person interview with two senior members of the technical team.
• Up to a full day onsite in Christchurch working through a real problem with the team; time will be paid.
• Final conversation with the CEO.

Equal opportunity and accommodations

Appetise is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds, identities, and experience levels. If you need any accommodations during the application process, the company asks that you let them know.

Additional information

The role is available for candidates who can work from the Christchurch office on a hybrid basis, with remote consideration for the right person in New Zealand or Australia. The company is looking for a hands-on principal engineer who can make technical calls, shape the work early, and help guide the engineering direction as the business expands internationally.