Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Salary: $180,000 – $210,000 per year plus benefits

Build the foundations for machine learning in a business investing in AI and automation. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you'll combine hands-on delivery with technical leadership, mentoring early-career ML engineers and establishing how the team develops, deploys and maintains models.

Your first priority will be automating workflows in a core product. Over the first three to six months, you'll focus on replacing manual, click-by-click processes with reliable automation, reducing the need for clients to log in and complete those steps themselves.
This is a permanent, full-time role with technical leadership and mentorship responsibilities, not direct people management.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical delivery of product workflow automation, working alongside junior ML engineers.

• Establish end-to-end ML workflows, standard operating procedures and best practices for model development and deployment.

• Build and integrate algorithms and models, choosing between custom development, pre-built models and existing AI capabilities to suit the problem.

• Mentor your teammates through hands-on collaboration, code guidance and sharing your technical and domain knowledge.

• Work with the broader data team to structure data and accelerate AI adoption.

What You'll Bring

• Substantial hands-on experience in machine learning and data science, including developing and deploying models.

• Strong Python skills and experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch.

• Experience guiding junior technical colleagues and helping them develop their skills.

• The ability to turn business problems into practical ML solutions and establish development practices others can follow.

Experience with Snowflake, particularly its built-in AI/ML capabilities, would be valuable but is not essential.

The Team And Opportunity: You'll work with early-career ML engineers within a broader data team that includes DBAs and data engineers.

This is an opportunity to shape the foundations rather than inherit an established ML function, working with generally clean, well-maintained data and large international datasets.

Interview Process: The planned process starts with a conversational catch-up, followed by an in-depth technical interview with the team's data science specialists.

Note: To apply for this position, you must currently hold a valid New Zealand work visa, or be a NZ Resident or Citizen. We are unable to consider applicants who do not meet these criteria.