Lead AI Engineer
Summary
Leads a team of AI engineers at Spark (New Zealand's largest telecom) building and deploying production-grade LLM, agentic, and RAG solutions across business units like BSS/OSS, CX, and Martech. Day-to-day: line-managing engineers, setting engineering and DevOps standards, ensuring release quality, growing in-house AI capability, and enforcing responsible-AI governance.
Ko wai mātou - About us
As New Zealand's largest telecommunications and digital services company, Spark’s purpose is to help all of New Zealand win big in a digital world. We provide mobile, broadband, and digital services to millions of New Zealanders and thousands of New Zealand businesses.
We operate in an exciting and constantly evolving industry, where the pace of change brings new and unique challenges every day, so we operate using Agile ways of working to allow us to meet the fast-changing needs of our customers.
Mō tēnei tūranga mahi - About the Role:
As Lead AI Engineer, your core mission is to lead a team of AI engineers to build and deploy production-grade AI and agentic solutions across Spark's business units (including BSS/OSS, Order & Fulfilment, Customer Experience, Martech, and Network & Ops).
Ngā mahi o ia rā – Daily tasks:
Team Leadership: Line-manage permanent AI engineers, establish engineering workflows, and drive measurable outcomes.
Engineering Standards: Define patterns for applications, agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and evaluation, while applying code review, test automation, and DevOps practices.
Release Readiness: Ensure pre-production build, test, and evaluation quality with built-in guardrails and observability.
Capability Growth: Build up internal skills and transition critical-path AI work from external partners to in-house teams.
AI Governance: Enforce responsible-AI controls and usage guidelines to safeguard Spark's intellectual property
Tō wheako- Your Experience:
Experience: 5+ years in software or machine learning engineering, with at least 2+ years leading engineering teams.
Technical Skills: Hands-on experience delivering production-grade LLM/GenAI applications (beyond proofs-of-concept), agentic frameworks, RAG, prompt engineering, and evaluation-driven development.
Stack: Cloud-native engineering on Azure, AWS, or GCP; Python; and modern MLOps tooling.
Enterprise Integration: Experience integrating AI into enterprise platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Dynamics 365 (D365).
He aha te take e uru ai koe ki a mātou – So, why choose us?
Te Kanorau me te Whakawhāiti mai - Diversity and Inclusion:
At Spark, we are constantly looking for ways to build a more inclusive culture. Our vision is for diversity and inclusion to be “how things are done at Spark”, embedded into our day-to-day activities, standards, and business practices. We want you to feel totally comfortable bringing your whole self to work regardless of your gender, ethnicity, orientation, age, or ability.
Toitū - Sustainability:
Sustainability is a key focus for us. We are dedicated to supporting Aotearoa New Zealand’s recovery and economic transformation. The principle of equity is at the very heart of our approach, and we remain committed to working in partnership to make a positive contribution to digital equity in line with our focus on Diversity and Inclusion.
Ō tatou painga – our Benefits:
Our people matter and we make sure we look after them. As a valued employee of Spark, we’ve got our people covered with a range of leading benefits including:
Wellbeing – Comprehensive medical insurance, life and income protection. Access to wellbeing coaches, EAP and in-house Specialist Clinical support through our leading Mahi Tahi Wellness programme.
Hybrid ways of working – for most teams at Spark this means being in the office for 4 days a week, with 1 day being flexible.
Leave – in addition to four weeks annual leave, we offer purchased leave, enhanced parental leave payments & support, and study leave.
Spark Credit – We provide permanent employees with $150 monthly Spark credit to use on any of our amazing products.
Spark Share scheme – periodically we offer the opportunity to buy into our share scheme.
Career development – access to an internal marketplace that connects employees with experiential, on the job learning across Spark.
Ngā pūkenga Motuhake – the must haves:
Due to the nature and urgency of this role, we are only considering applicants that are based in New Zealand with permanent residency, citizenship, or a valid work visa (with at least 18 months remaining).