Senior AI Engineer

Overview

Air New Zealand is looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join its Digital team and help create, deliver, and scale practical Generative AI solutions that improve customer and employee experiences. This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic influence, supporting reliable, secure, and high-performance AI services that can power personalised digital journeys, better operational outcomes, and AI-enabled workplace tools.

What you will do

• Develop, launch, and support Generative AI services and applications in Python, taking them from early prototypes through to production use.
• Build secure and dependable AI solutions that connect enterprise data, tools, and platforms to produce scalable business value.
• Put in place controls, monitoring, guardrails, and governance practices to support responsible use of AI.
• Partner with business stakeholders to uncover where Generative AI can deliver meaningful impact.
• Keep up with new GenAI developments and apply modern approaches in real-world solutions.

What you need

• Deep experience with Generative AI, including LLMs, agents, embeddings, rerankers, vector databases, and prompt design or evaluation.
• Strong Python engineering capability, including experience with asynchronous frameworks such as FastAPI, as well as testing, mocking, and CI/CD.
• Solid data engineering and MLOps knowledge, including relational and NoSQL databases, feature stores, model and registry versioning, and offline/online evaluation approaches.
• Experience working with cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, plus container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes; infrastructure as code experience with Terraform or CloudFormation is an advantage.
• Comfort working in enterprise settings with privacy, security, compliance, and sensitive data requirements.
• A curious, growth-oriented mindset with the ability to turn ideas into maintainable, production-ready systems.
• Capability to solve real-world problems using AI and data while guiding others toward high-quality engineering outcomes.

Why this role

• Work on advanced AI solutions that help shape how Generative AI is used across the airline.
• Contribute to customer-facing innovation, smarter operations, and employee productivity tools.
• Join a team that values experimentation, learning, and practical engineering excellence.

Additional information

Air New Zealand is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and aims to provide an environment where people can be themselves and thrive. The company encourages applications from people of all backgrounds, including those with disabilities, additional health or mental health needs, and neurodiverse candidates.

If you encounter accessibility barriers or need reasonable accommodations during the recruitment process, you should contact the recruiter referenced in the advertisement so support can be arranged.

Applications close on 3 July 2026.

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