LawVu is the premier legal workspace for in-house legal teams, unifying matter, contract, and spend management. Headquartered in Tauranga since 2015, LawVu’s platform leverages AI to automate routine tasks, surface actionable insights, and empower legal teams to focus on strategic work.

The Engineering Director – Platform will drive and own the platform capabilities that underpin LawVu’s product development to support and empower the product streams. Your primary mandate is enabling the business to scale and grow, through a world-class engineering platform that accelerates feature delivery, ensures reliability, quality, and drives innovation.

You will work with the other engineering directors (Data & Operations) and work/partner closely with the Principal Engineers.

Areas of Responsibilities

1. Product Development Partnership

• Collaborate closely with product value streams leads to ensure the platform supports product requirements as an enabler.
• Embed platform capabilities within product streams workflows, ensuring seamless integration of shared services.
• Act as a technical advisor in product planning sessions, providing guidance on platform constraints, roadmap alignment, and implementation strategies.

2. Process & Team Enablement

• Foster a culture of platform adoption through culture, documentation, and internal evangelism, treating product teams as key customers of the platform.
• Mentor & Support the platform team to promote cross-functional best practices and collaborate with the principal engineers.

3. Platform & Engineering Excellence

• Infrastructure: Build and manage scalable, reliable, and secure cloud or on-premises environments to support business-critical applications.

o Automate infrastructure provisioning and ensure consistency using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Bicep), while continuously optimizing cloud resources for cost efficiency and proactively maintaining, patching, and updating systems to prevent incidents or degradation.

• Developer Experience: Foster a seamless and empowering engineering environment with easy access to tools, fast feedback cycles, and reduced friction in development workflows.

o Best practices: Define and enforce engineering standards, architectural guidelines, and process improvements to drive quality and consistency.

o AI Efficiency: Leverage AI-driven tools and automated insights to improve observability, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis with minimal manual intervention.

• Observability: Implement robust observability practices (metrics, logs, traces) to enable rapid diagnosis, system health assessment, and assurance of service reliability.

o Centralize and structure logs for actionable insights and rapid troubleshooting, continuously monitor key system health metrics to detect issues, and implement intelligent alerts that promptly notify responders of disruptions while minimizing alert fatigue.

• Security: Ensure applications and environments are built and operated with the highest security standards, including regular audits, encryption, and vulnerability management.

o Advanced security threat detection: Deploy advanced solutions, such as behavioral analytics and automated threat hunting, to quickly identify and respond to sophisticated attacks.

o Secure development practices: Embed security from design through deployment, including code reviews, automated scans, and continuous education of engineering staff.

• Scalability: Design systems and components to handle growing loads gracefully, maintaining performance and reliability as user and data volumes increase.

o Maintainability: Architect systems for ease of updates, debugging, and evolution, minimizing technical debt and maximizing team efficiency over the long term.

o Performant & Responsive: Optimize platforms for fast, consistent response times and throughput, delivering a superior experience for both end users and internal teams.

4. Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and AI-driven development enhancements to continuously evolve the platform in service of LawVu’s product vision.
• Lead POCs for new platform capabilities—such as developer AI assistants, advanced observability — to validate and prioritize investments.
• Measure platform impact using metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and developer satisfaction, iterating to deliver greater value.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading platform or product engineering teams in B2B SaaS environments.
• Proven track record delivering internal developer platforms that materially accelerate product development and improve reliability.
• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure (Microsoft Azure must have), Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and observability tooling. · Strong product partnership skills with experience embedding shared services into multiple product teams.

o Business acumen and strategic understanding to direct, scope and deliver a platform strategy that underpins the business direction

o Ability to uplift, train and grow people

o Ability to communicate and story tell to create buy in and momentum.

• Excellent leadership and communication skills, with ability to steer and align senior stakeholders, peers and cross-functional teams around a unified platform vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure supporting AI-powered applications.
• Familiarity with legal technology workflows and compliance requirements.
• Background in multi-tenant SaaS architecture and global scale operations.

What sets us apart:

• Monthly wellness allowance to use on whatever enables you to bring your whole self to work - gym membership, massage, childcare.. the list goes on!
• Health insurance cover 
• Extended paid parental leave
• Extra paid day off on your birthday
• Share options so you can have a piece of the pie
• Home office allowance set up for remote employees

Why LawVu?

At LawVu we support many types of flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. We offer the opportunity to get onboard a growth company early and the opportunity to participate in LawVu’s success through our incentive scheme. LawVu has rapidly expanding offices and our work environment encourages continuous improvement and future career development. 

Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables us to better understand and serve customers and innovate successfully. From the moment you join, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.

Our team is only as strong as the culture it is built upon. Our core values are:

Inspire and Delight

We take pride in what we do and go the extra mile to create experiences that inspire and delight our customers.

Move Swiftly

We do what we say we will do, moving fast to get the right things done to make an impact.

Dig Deeper

No challenge is too big. With courage we embrace the challenge, learn from our mistakes and share the knowledge

Take Ownership

With every decision and behaviour, however big or small, we take ownership of it's impact on our business.

Back yourself. Back others

We strive to be supportive, honest people who respect each other and build a high level of trust to perform as a winning team.

Bring your Woo

Woo is what energises us, brings us joy and makes us unique.  We seek to create a safe environment that fosters bringing your whole self so you can thrive.

We are constantly working towards making LawVu one of the best places to work, for everyone. LawVu is committed to providing equality of opportunity, valuing diversity and promoting a culture of inclusion. We will ensure this by fostering a workplace where people feel safe to be themselves, are able to do the best work of their lives and fulfil their potential. We believe by bringing together our diversity of thoughts and backgrounds, we will develop a world class product for the equally diverse customers we serve.

We make hiring decisions based on your experience, skills and passion. If you would like to apply and need reasonable adjustments or would like to note which pronouns you use at any point in the application or interview process, please let us know.