Hybrid Principal Engineer – Performance and Reliability

at Henry Schein

• Job title: Principal Engineer – Performance and Reliability
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: No Education Requirement
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Albany, New Zealand

About the role

• Principal Engineer leading stability, performance, and operational maturity efforts for Ascend at Henry Schein. Focusing on telemetry, observability, and proactive reliability engineering incidents.

Responsibilities

• Lead platform-wide efforts to improve system stability, performance, telemetry, and operational visibility.
• Define and evolve Ascend's observability strategy across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and diagnostics.
• Investigate complex system performance issues across services, databases, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Drive a more proactive operating model by identifying risks and bottlenecks before they become customer-facing incidents.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to improve reliability under load and performance in production.
• Establish standards, patterns, and engineering practices for performance testing, instrumentation, and operational readiness.
• Use telemetry and production data to guide prioritisation, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Support major incident diagnosis where needed, while reducing long-term dependence on reactive firefighting.
• Influence architecture and platform decisions to improve scalability, resilience, and transparency of system behaviour.
• Mentor engineers and technical leaders in performance thinking, observability, and reliability engineering practices.

Requirements

• Proven experience operating at Principal or Staff Engineer level in complex, distributed software environments.
• Deep expertise in observability, telemetry, monitoring, and performance engineering.
• Strong hands-on capability across services, databases, APIs, infrastructure, and production diagnostics.
• Demonstrated ability to identify systemic issues and implement durable engineering improvements.
• Experience improving reliability and performance in growing SaaS or enterprise platforms.
• Strong incident analysis and root cause investigation skills.
• Ability to work cross-functionally and influence multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate technical risks and trade-offs for engineering and business leaders.
• Track record of balancing strategic leadership with practical delivery and hands-on technical problem solving.

Benefits

• Flexible working arrangements
• Professional development opportunities