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About Innova IT
A specialist quality engineering firm based in Auckland, working across New Zealand and Australia on the platforms that cannot afford an outage.
Senior engineers only.
No bench to feed.
Innova IT exists because of a specific, repeated observation: most organisations do not have a testing problem. They have an evidence problem.
They ship, and hope. They have dashboards nobody reads, a regression suite everyone has quietly agreed to skip, and a performance number from a test that did not resemble production. When something fails at peak, the post-incident review discovers that nobody had ever actually measured it.
We are structured deliberately against that. Every engagement is staffed with senior engineers who have delivered the same class of problem before. There is no pyramid, no juniors learning on your programme, and no discovery phase you pay for while we read your architecture diagrams.
We work across New Zealand and Australia, on site in Auckland and remotely elsewhere, in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Sergio Rodriguez
Founder & Principal Quality Engineer
Eighteen years designing, leading and scaling performance and automation practices across banking, fintech, telco, e-commerce, healthcare, energy and automotive. Test automation architect, performance test architect, and practice lead — frequently all three on the same programme.
Work has included establishing a Testing Centre of Excellence for a big-four bank's software engineering organisation, architecting performance strategy across concurrent high-complexity programmes for New Zealand's largest bank, and managing a ten-country performance test team for a global CRM implementation.
Doctoral research in machine learning applied to software testing. Post-graduate study in AI and machine learning at Caltech. ISTQB certified, AWS and Dynatrace accredited. New Zealand and EU citizen.
Qualifications
- PhD, Computer Science
- Machine learning in software testing — in progress
- Post-Graduate, AI & ML
- California Institute of Technology
- MSc, IT Management
- NZQA recognised
- BSc, Computer Science
- NZQA recognised
Certifications
- ISTQB Foundation — ANZTB
- AWS Cloud Practitioner
- Dynatrace Associate
- Data Scientist Speciality
- CMMI for Development
Eighteen years,
compressed.
The through-line: high-volume transactional systems in regulated industries, where the cost of finding out late is measured in incidents rather than inconvenience.
2024 — present
E-commerce replatform assurance for a major New Zealand grocery group. BDD framework from zero, full checkout and GraphQL lifecycle coverage.
2022 — 2024
Core banking performance at big-four scale. 105 endpoints, 2M transactions per cycle, Testing Centre of Excellence established. Card platform replacement across six financial domains. Energy trading system upgrade.
2020 — 2022
Connected vehicle fleet platform at 56,000 requests per minute for a global automotive manufacturer, plus enterprise APM rollout assurance.
2016 — 2019
Performance architecture for New Zealand's largest bank. National postal operator APM programme across 22 production applications. Security stack migration for a global financial services division.
2012 — 2016
Healthcare HL7 performance — 20% response time improvement delivered. Ten-country CRM performance programme. ERP and payments engagements across three continents.
2005 — 2012
Software engineering, business analysis and operations engineering across energy and telecommunications.
Registered entity
Innova IT Ltd, registered in New Zealand.
NZBN 9429047642218
Location
Auckland, New Zealand.
Serving New Zealand and Australia.
Contact
AI model policy
Standardised on Anthropic’s Claude, under published governance. Read the practice
Data handling
No client production data enters a model. Mandatory human review of every AI-assisted artefact.
Coverage
New Zealand and Australia.
On site and remote.
Bring us the release you are
least comfortable shipping.
A short, specific conversation is usually enough to tell whether we can help. No discovery deck, no bench to feed — just an engineer who has broken systems like yours on purpose, many times.
Typical first engagement: a two to three week assessment producing a workload model, an instrumented baseline and a ranked list of what will fail first.