Chapter Lead

**General information**: - Location - Auckland - Expertise - Data Automation - Job Level - Experienced - Employment Type - Permanent full-time - Close Date - 26-Sep-2025 - Ref # - 62380 **Description & Requirements**: **Spark NZ** - 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. Agile replaces the traditional hierarchical organisational structure to produce a transparent, collaborative environment with highly productive teams who are empowered to deliver better outcomes for our customers, communities, and all of New Zealand. **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. **Day to day you will be involved in**: - 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. - 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. **What experience you'll bring?** - 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. **WHY CHOOSE US**: **Diversity and Inclusion: Te Kanorau me te Whakawhāiti mai** - 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. **Sustainability: Toitū** - 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. **Benefits: Awhina** - 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 r