Senior Support Technician | CORE + AI

Salary: Competitive pkg + 10 paid training days

Let's be honest. If you've worked in IT support for a while, you've probably discovered that "just a quick question" is rarely quick, and "it's probably nothing" almost always becomes something.

This role has another question attached to it:

"Could AI or automation make this problem go away altogether?"

We're looking for a Senior Support Technician to specialise in supporting clients using CORE, First Focus's managed IT and AI service.

You'll still need to be seriously good at traditional IT support. Servers, endpoints, networks, Azure, Entra, M365 and the occasional piece of technology apparently held together by hope and a service account nobody remembers creating.

But you'll also be someone who has gone further with AI than asking ChatGPT to make an email sound friendlier.

You'll help implement practical AI and automation solutions for your clients, support the technology around them, and help us work out what excellent AI-enabled managed support looks like.

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Who we are (and why you might actually like us)

We're First Focus, Australia's top MSP (Cloudtango says so, nine years running), with almost 500 people across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. We're relatively new to New Zealand, but we're not here for a working holiday. We're building a serious NZ business and we genuinely believe we can become New Zealand's favourite MSP.

CORE is an important part of where we're heading.

Traditional managed IT has largely focused on keeping systems running, securing environments and fixing things when they break. All still rather important, obviously. CORE adds another dimension. It brings managed IT together with AI, automation, data governance, security and ongoing improvement, helping clients get more from their technology rather than simply keeping the lights blinking green.

That's why this isn't quite a standard Senior Support Technician role. We're looking for someone who can support the environment and comfortably implement the AI and automation improvements that sit within it.

So what's this role really about?

Internally, we call our senior support technicians Client SMEs, because that's what we expect them to become.

You'll own a smaller portfolio of CORE clients, provide senior L2/L3 support and become someone who genuinely understands their environments. The difference is your strength in AI and automation.

When an opportunity has been identified through CORE, you'll help turn it into something useful, whether that's an AI tool, agent, workflow or automation. In other words, we don't need someone who has read extensively about the future of AI on LinkedIn. We need someone who likes actually making the stuff work.

Why you'll probably enjoy this

• Own your CORE clients, rather than living an endless "close ticket, next ticket" existence

• Combine proper senior L2/L3 technical work with hands-on AI and automation

• Implement solutions that real users will actually use

• Work with smart engineers and escalation teams when things get properly weird

• Mentor other technicians and help lift our practical AI capability

• Work hybrid near our NZ locations, or remotely elsewhere in New Zealand

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What you'll be doing

• Providing senior L2/L3 support and acting as the technical SME for your CORE clients

• Supporting Microsoft environments across Windows Server, AD, Azure, Entra and M365

• Troubleshooting across infrastructure, networking, cloud, backup, security and virtualisation

• Implementing AI tools, agents, workflows and automation identified through CORE

• Working with technologies such as ChatGPT, Claude, Power Automate, M365 and SharePoint

• Collaborating with engineering teams, mentoring other technicians and documenting things properly (future you says thanks)

What you'll bring

• Strong senior L2/L3 experience across Microsoft environments

• Solid Windows Server, AD, DNS, GPO, Azure, Entra and M365 knowledge

• Broad infrastructure skills across endpoints, servers, networking, firewalls, virtualisation and backup

• Genuine hands-on experience with AI tools, agents and automation, particularly ChatGPT, Claude and Power Automate

• Ideally, experience implementing AI or automation solutions for real users

• MSP or multi-client experience is strongly preferred, although strong internal IT backgrounds are welcome

• Excellent communication, client service and technical judgement

• Curiosity, because the AI tool everyone is excited about next year probably hasn't been launched yet

You don't need to be an AI researcher, data scientist or someone who can explain transformer architecture on a whiteboard while everyone else quietly leaves the room.

Production AI experience is strongly preferred, but we're not going to pretend everyone can have ten years' commercial experience in technology that hasn't existed for ten years.

If you've gone deep, built genuinely useful things and understand how to turn AI from an interesting demo into something people can rely on, we'd like to hear from you.

We'll teach you the First Focus approach to AI governance, security and responsible implementation through CORE.

A quick note on how we work

One of our values is Live Curiously, and this role is probably one of the better examples of what we mean by it.

Technology is changing quickly. AI is changing considerably faster. We don't expect you to arrive knowing every tool that will matter two years from now, mostly because we'd quite like you to be human and not a time traveller.

We do expect you to ask questions, experiment intelligently, challenge clunky ways of working and keep learning.

We also Always Communicate, Be the Solution, Win Together, Keep it Simple, Wow the Customer and Never Stop Growing. They're not intended as motivational wallpaper. They're a pretty reasonable description of how we expect people to behave when nobody is looking.

Benefits

AKA The good stuff

• Competitive salary package plus KiwiSaver and other benefits

• Flexible hybrid working if you're near one of our NZ locations, with remote options elsewhere in New Zealand

• Free access to Uprise, including 1:1 coaching with qualified psychologists or counsellors

• Never Stop Growing, 10 paid study days per year, certification support and exam fees paid

• Regular internal technical training and access to our learning library

• FastTrack mentoring program

• Opportunities to develop your AI and automation capability as CORE grows

• MAD (Making A Difference) Council supporting equality, charity and environmental initiatives

• Regular social events and a genuinely good team culture

The important bit

If you're a strong senior support technician who has already found yourself going much deeper into AI than most of your colleagues, this might be the role you've been waiting for.

You don't need every AI buzzword on your CV.

You do need excellent support fundamentals, strong Microsoft infrastructure knowledge, genuine hands-on AI experience and enough curiosity to keep learning as the technology changes underneath all of us.

We're building something interesting with CORE, and we're looking for people who want to help make it genuinely useful for clients.

Apply now. Or spend another 45 minutes asking Claude whether you should apply, then apply anyway.

Neurodiversity: First Focus welcomes applications from Neurodiverse candidates. We recommend & appreciate disclosure along with the application so that a copy of our Neurodiversity Statement can be provided outlining the flexible options we can offer to best showcase your skills.

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