AI Engineer (Auckland or Wellington)

Build AI people actually use, and help shape the engineering behind it.

AI at Acumen has moved past experimentation. We have our own AI stack in production, client demand is growing, and we’re building the engineering capability to take on more of that work.

We’re hiring an AI Engineer to work across both client delivery and Acumen’s own AI products. It’s a hands-on role for someone who likes building, wants to work on real business problems, and cares about what happens after the prototype works.

We’re open to intermediate and senior engineers, with strong software engineering fundamentals and meaningful hands-on AI experience expected at either level. More experienced engineers will naturally take ownership of larger and more complex work, with greater independence and technical leadership. We’re primarily looking for the right person, but if we meet more than one exceptional candidate we may make more than one appointment.

What you’ll work on

In client engagements, you’ll help organisations work out where AI can genuinely help, then turn those opportunities into useful, production-ready solutions.

That could mean establishing secure and repeatable patterns for AI in Snowflake, building workflows and agents that operate across enterprise systems, developing applications that let people work with organisational data and documents, or taking an existing AI prototype and engineering it properly for production.

You’ll work directly with clients to understand the problem, shape the solution and build it. Depending on the problem, that might involve writing the application, designing integrations, working through security or deployment constraints, or deciding that conventional software is a better answer than AI.

Alongside client work, you’ll spend meaningful time on Acumen’s own AI products and platforms. Kea, our internal AI application, is already in production and continues to evolve. We have working software, established architecture and opinions about how this should be done, while still having plenty left to shape.

For a more experienced engineer, there’s also room to influence our engineering practices, technical direction and the AI services we take to customers.

What we’re looking for

• This role needs someone who builds software, not just designs solutions around it.
• Hands-on software engineering experience and the ability to build maintainable software.
• Good working habits around source control, testing, deployment, APIs and software quality.
• Meaningful experience personally building AI-enabled solutions.
• The ability to explain the technical decisions and trade-offs you made.
• Good judgement when turning an unclear problem into something useful and buildable.
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical people.
• A habit of learning and experimenting as the technology changes.
• We care more about what you can build and how you think than a particular number of years working under an AI job title.

Experience we’d value

Depending on your background, you may also bring experience with some of the following:

Taking software or AI-enabled solutions into production.

CI/CD, automated testing, application security and observability.

Integration-heavy systems, APIs or distributed applications.

Snowflake Cortex or other enterprise AI platforms.

Data, cloud or platform engineering.

Technical design or architecture.

Consulting or direct client delivery.

Coaching or technical leadership.

We don’t expect one person to bring all of these. Different backgrounds will bring different strengths to the role.

Technology

Our current work spans TypeScript, Python, APIs and integrations, containers, PostgreSQL, LLM APIs and tooling, and Snowflake/Cortex.

That stack will keep changing, so we’re more interested in engineers who can learn new tools quickly and make sound choices about when to use them, than people who happen to match a particular technology list. AI-assisted development is already a normal part of how we work.

About Acumen

Acumen BI is a New Zealand data and technology consultancy working across data engineering, analytics, architecture and AI.

We’re a relatively small team, so engineers work closely with clients and with people across different technical disciplines. You’ll be able to draw on experienced architects, data engineers, platform engineers and other specialists rather than being expected to solve every part of a problem yourself.

The role can be based in Auckland or Wellington. Our normal working pattern is one day a week in the office and four from home, although individual client engagements sometimes need something different.

Applying

Please apply via seek with your CV and a short cover letter.

We expect many applicants will use AI to help prepare their application, and that’s fine. We use it every day too. What matters to us is that what you tell us is specific, true and actually reflects your own work.

In your cover letter, tell us what about this role most interests you, and describe one AI-enabled thing you personally built:

What problem were you trying to solve?

What did you personally build?

What was one technical decision or trade-off you had to make?

* What did you learn, or what would you do differently now?

If you have something you can share, such as a repo, demo, screenshot or write-up, include it. We know that much of the best commercial work can’t be shared publicly, so this is useful rather than required.

Please note that your application material may be reviewed by AI systems as part of the screening and analysis process.