Principal AI Solution Engineer

About One NZ

One NZ is committed to building a better-connected Aotearoa New Zealand, aiming to become the world's most AI-enabled telecommunications company. We focus on empowering our people through innovative learning opportunities such as an AI School, access to global learning platforms, and evolving career pathways that nurture curiosity and skill growth.

Role Overview

The Principal AI Solution Engineer collaborates with business stakeholders and engineering teams to design and implement scalable, high-performance AI and data solutions aligned with One NZ's strategic goals. This role involves hands-on technical leadership, ownership of AI engineering practices, and influencing the development of frameworks and delivery approaches to help position One NZ as a global AI-enabled telco leader.

Responsibilities

• Lead the detailed technical planning and execution of AI engineering strategies and projects.
• Translate technical standards, strategies, and architectures into actionable implementation plans and solution designs.
• Provide hands-on leadership across complex projects to ensure alignment with architectural standards and patterns.
• Create, maintain, and promote reusable AI, data, cloud, and software engineering patterns for consistent squad delivery.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design reviews, coaching, knowledge sharing, and structured development planning.
• Maintain AI engineering frameworks including solution design, coding standards, DevOps and AgentOps practices, prompt and agent patterns, lifecycle management, observability, evaluation, governance, and production readiness.
• Prototype and test new technologies and solution patterns rapidly to validate feasibility and reduce risks.
• Ensure AI solutions meet requirements for security, safety, scalability, monitoring, performance, explainability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and production readiness.
• Guide decision-making to resolve blockers, assess feasibility, risks, trade-offs, investments, and delivery methods.
• Document technical designs, decisions, implementation guides, runbooks, and materials for knowledge sharing.
• Define and enhance AI Solution Engineering craft through capability standards, development paths, certification plans, and quality engineering practices.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience with AI solution engineering, including Generative AI, large language model (LLM) integration, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), APIs, automation, cloud platforms, DevOps, and AgentOps.
• Proven ability to lead technically, coaching and developing engineers through teaching, feedback, mentoring, and structured growth plans.
• Strong expertise in AI solution design patterns such as LLM orchestration, RAG, agent design, tooling, workflow automation, human-in-the-loop frameworks, evaluation methods, vector databases, and enterprise integration.
• Deep knowledge of software engineering fundamentals and modern development environments including Python, API development, continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), testing, data quality, metadata, semantic layers, knowledge retrieval, and access control mechanisms.
• Hands-on experience with cloud and AI platforms like AWS, enterprise AI solutions, orchestration tools, vector databases, monitoring tools, and integration with data platforms.
• Capability to convert strategy and architecture into actionable plans balancing cost, risk, schedule, and business value.
• Strong commitment to responsible data and AI use with awareness of cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, governance, and operational risks.
• Excellent systems thinking and problem-solving abilities to navigate ambiguity and create practical, scalable solutions.
• Clear and persuasive technical communication skills to explain designs, challenge directions constructively, and unify teams collaboratively.

Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements including options to work remotely and adjust hours to balance professional and personal life.
• Comprehensive Southern Cross health insurance fully covered for employees and their families.
• Opportunity to purchase extra annual leave weeks via lifestyle leave.
• Discounts on One NZ products and services and additional benefits.

Diversity & Inclusion

One NZ is proud to be Rainbow Tick certified, valuing diverse thoughts, perspectives, and backgrounds in our workforce. Joining One NZ represents the start of a journey to challenge, inspire, and contribute to something greater.