Senior AI Engineer

Overview

Air New Zealand is looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join its Digital team in Christchurch. The position focuses on designing, building, and scaling generative AI solutions that create better experiences for customers and employees, while improving operations and supporting more sustainable travel.

This is a practical engineering role that combines hands-on coding with applied AI architecture. You will help deliver reliable, secure, and high-performing AI services, contribute to AI strategy, and mentor others as the company expands its use of generative AI.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and support generative AI services and applications in Python, taking them from early prototype stages through to production deployment.
• Architect secure and resilient AI solutions that connect enterprise data, tools, and platforms to generate scalable business value.
• Create controls for responsible AI use, including guardrails, monitoring, and governance mechanisms.
• Work with business teams to uncover opportunities where generative AI can add measurable value.
• Keep pace with new developments in generative AI and apply relevant innovations in practice.

What you will need

You should bring senior-level engineering experience and a track record of solving real business problems using AI and data. The role suits someone comfortable building safe, scalable AI systems, designing agent-based workflows, writing robust production code, and helping others deliver high-quality AI solutions.

• Deep practical experience with generative AI, including LLMs, agents, embeddings, rerankers, vector databases, and prompt design or evaluation.
• Strong Python software engineering skills, including experience with asynchronous frameworks such as FastAPI, plus testing, mocking, and CI/CD.
• Solid data engineering and MLOps knowledge, covering SQL and NoSQL systems, feature stores, model or registry versioning, offline and online evaluation, and golden datasets.
• Experience working with cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, along with container tools like Docker and Kubernetes; Terraform or CloudFormation is an advantage.
• Understanding of enterprise security, privacy, and compliance, especially when handling sensitive data in regulated settings.
• A curious, experimental, and improvement-focused mindset with the ability to turn ideas into maintainable systems.

Additional information

Air New Zealand is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and aims to provide an environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive. Candidates with disabilities, additional health or mental health needs, and neurodiverse applicants are encouraged to apply.

If you need accessibility support or reasonable accommodations during recruitment, you can contact the recruiter listed in the advertisement for assistance.

Applications close on 24 July 2026.

Whāia te pae tawhiti kia tata. Ko te pae tata whakamaua, kia tina. “Seek to bring distant horizons closer. Once near, seize them and make them your reality.”