About the Role

This role is 32 hours per week.

Love water but hate floods? Passionate about protecting ecosystems and delivering solutions that actually last? If you care about water quality, river life, wetlands, land drainage, and keeping compliance afloat and can navigate the currents of operational resilience with a proactive, future-focused mindset, this role is your perfect stream. You're the kind of engineer who moves before the storm hits.

You'll:

• Manage day-to-day delivery of surface water operations, environmental, and maintenance.
• Provide specialist environmental engineering expertise for stormwater reticulation and treatment systems, and waterways, grounded in protecting the mauri of our rivers, wetlands, and ecosystems.
• Ensure regulatory compliance and uphold environmental and health & safety standards.
• Oversee customer service requests and maintain strong stakeholder relationships.
• Drive and manage the surface water monitoring programme - sampling, analytics, reporting and consent compliance.
• Provide accurate reporting and contribute to strategic planning, including Annual and Long-Term Plans.

About You

You're an experienced environmental engineering professional who thinks holistically to solve problems and balances technical precision with ecosystem mauri while delivering long-term, resilient outcomes. You're also a champion of consenting and regulatory compliance. You thrive in dynamic environments and love solving problems before they ripple out.

You'll also have:

• 5+ years in water or environmental engineering, ideally in local authority or consultancy.
• Strong practical and technical understanding of wetlands, land drainage networks, culverts, waterways, irrigation, and stock water races and environmental regulations.
• Experience with asset monitoring, water/soil/sediment sampling, sediment analysis, data evaluation and compliance reporting.
• Deliver operational surface water projects, including ecological assessments, biodiversity enhancements, and district-wide water quality monitoring.
• Dedication to health, safety, and wellbeing.
• A relevant engineering or environmental qualification and a full driver's licence.

What we can offer:

• Great work-life balance with flexibility
• Career coaching and development
• Life insurance
• Wellbeing and volunteer leave
• Three days paid leave between Christmas and New Year
• Two weeks paid Partners Leave
• Sick leave from day one
• Continued KiwiSaver contributions during savings suspension
• Discounts with local and national businesses

About us:
Selwyn is one of the fastest-growing districts in New Zealand. We have a fantastic quality of life, great communities, and a thriving economy. Our Council works actively with residents to provide the services and facilities that help our communities to thrive and grow.

Our head office is based in Rolleston (only 25km from Christchurch), which offers an enviable family lifestyle, outstanding local facilities and an easy drive to the ski fields, rivers and hills that make up Canterbury's stunning landscape.

Our values:

• Be a good human
• Be brave - Think differently
• Better together - Make it happen for Selwyn

We honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi and are committed to working with our Treaty partner to deliver on our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

We value the safety of our community; this role requires a satisfactory safety check including police vetting and for you to pass a drug and alcohol test.

Ready to take the next step? Apply now and help us keep Selwyn flowing smoothly!

Please note: this role closes on 13 January 2026. With Christmas and New Year holidays, any requested call backs will not be answered from 24 December until 5 January 2026.