AI Engineering Manager

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 a fast-moving and constantly evolving industry. Spark uses Agile ways of working to stay responsive to customer needs and reduce complexity. Agile replaces the traditional hierarchical structure with collaborative, transparent teams focused on delivery and continuous improvement.

Mō tēnei tūranga mahi - About the role:

We’re hiring a Chapter Lead – AI Engineering to lead and grow our AI engineering capability. The chapter includes engineers working across multiple squads and business areas. Your role is to build strong technical capability, shape how we design and deliver AI-powered systems, and ensure consistency in how we approach engineering across Spark.

This role combines technical leadership, people development, and strategic input. You’ll support engineers with hands-on guidance, create shared tools and practices that teams can use, and contribute directly to product delivery when needed. You will also advise on Spark’s broader AI direction and ensure what we build is scalable, reliable, and valuable to the business.

Ngā mahi o ia rā – Daily tasks:

• Lead the AI Engineering chapter by setting clear expectations for how we write, test, review, and release software, ensuring code is maintainable, safe to change, and delivered on agreed timelines.
• Support engineers with day-to-day guidance, pairing, and structured development plans.
• Work across squads to design and deliver AI applications, including workflows such as search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multi-agent orchestration, optimisation, and evaluation pipelines.
• Design system-level that are scalable, reliable and maintainable.
• Build reusable libraries, APIs, and pipelines that can be used across domains to accelerate delivery.
• Establish practical engineering patterns for integrating AI/ML models into production systems, with clear standards for testing, deployment, observability, evaluation, and governance.
• Evaluate new tools and frameworks critically - looking beyond hype to determine what’s useful for Spark’s context.
• Contribute to Spark’s broader AI strategy, platform direction, and investment roadmap.
• Participate directly in product development where technical depth or system thinking is needed.

Tō wheako- your experience:

• Experience leading technical teams or chapters in software or AI/ML engineering.
• Strong software development background in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience with cloud-based AI/ML services such as Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Amazon Bedrock, or SageMaker.
• Knowledge of model lifecycle management, including training, deployment, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Experience designing and implementing AI systems that integrate with enterprise platforms and data environments such as Snowflake, Databricks, Cosmos DB, and Postgres.
• Strong understanding of working with structured and unstructured data, including data modelling, indexing, retrieval, and transformation for AI workflows.
• Comfortable working across both traditional ML and GenAI patterns (e.g. RAG, orchestration, prompt handling).
• Experience designing software systems with CI/CD, cloud-native infrastructure, and secure-by-default practices.
• Clear, structured communication skills — able to work across engineers, product owners, architects, and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to mentor engineers at different levels and provide grounded, actionable feedback.
• Practical judgment — able to balance engineering quality, delivery pace, and business value.

Nice to have

• Experience productising internal AI tools into platforms used across multiple teams.
• Knowledge of vector databases, semantic search, or graph-based data platforms.
• Familiarity with enterprise-grade chatbot and automation solutions.
• Telecommunications or enterprise-scale system experience.

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 $120 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)