Artificial Intelligence Engineer

A mid-level developer with real experience on the front end, the back end, or both, and a genuine obsession with AI. You will ship AI systems for our clients and direct AI agents through most of your own work.

Salary
NZ$84,000 a year
Employment type
Full-time, permanent, mid-level
Location
Eden Terrace, Auckland
Working pattern
Hybrid: 2 to 3 days in the office, the rest from home

About the role

Sentry AI is hiring an Artificial Intelligence Engineer to help build production AI for businesses across ANZ and Asia. This is a mid-level role, and we care far more about what you have built and how fast you learn than the years on your CV.

This is our first hire, so you will work directly alongside the founder and see how the whole business runs. You get real control over the development strategy: the tooling, the architecture and the way we build are yours to shape.

We want an ambitious developer with real experience on the front end, the back end, or both, and a genuine obsession with AI. The role has two halves: shipping AI systems for our clients, and using AI to run your own work, from planning a build through to watching it live in production.

We build for businesses that are counting on it, across healthcare, recruitment, real estate and SaaS. The problems are state of the art, and they have real consequences when they are wrong.

What you will build

  • Take a rough client brief and turn it into a system that works, then own how it behaves once real people are using it
  • Build agents that do real work inside a business: retrieving, deciding and acting on live data, with a human approving anything that carries a consequence
  • Ship voice AI that holds a real conversation with a real customer, including the awkward paths where it does not go to plan
  • Direct AI agents through most of the build: set the architecture and the context, review what comes back, and catch the wrong answer before it ships
  • Run our in-house WATCH methodology on live projects, and sharpen it as you go

The stack

What we run today. You will not know all of it on day one and nobody expects you to.

  • Frontend. Next.js, TypeScript, Vercel. The interface over your own work.
  • Backend. Python, FastAPI, Supabase and Postgres. Where the services and the agents run.
  • Data. Supabase, AWS RDS, RAG, vectorisation and embeddings. How a model reaches a company's own knowledge.
  • AI. Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, MCP, LangChain, Langfuse, AgentCore, OpenClaw, frontier and open-weight models. The agentic layer: how a model gets context, tools and limits.

How we work

Agentic by default. Coding agents, harnesses and context files are standard issue here. The bar is not whether you use AI, it is how well you direct it and how quickly you notice when it is wrong.

The WATCH methodology. WATCH is our in-house development methodology for AI-first engineering: how a rough client brief becomes an agentic system that is safe to point at a live business. Five stages, and you will run all of them:

  • Workshop. Plan it. Read the client profile, organise the problem, and log the work to actions.md
  • Architect. Write task.md and test.md before a line of it gets built
  • Task. Build to task.md, and write the tests as you go
  • Check. Run the tests, react-doctor, and the security and compliance audit
  • Hand off. Open the in-depth PR, watch CI, and queue the merge

It is new, and the engineers running it shape what it becomes.

What we look for

  • Passion projects over a decorated CV. Show us the coolest thing you have built and what broke along the way
  • Real experience on the front end, the back end, or both. Depth on one side and curiosity about the other is enough
  • An AI-first mindset. You build with coding agents daily, and we will ask you to walk us through your setup
  • You keep up: you already know what changed in the tooling this quarter
  • The right to work in New Zealand, and able to be in the Eden Terrace office two to three days a week

Nice to have

  • Experience with some of the tools in our stack above
  • Voice AI experience: Retell, ElevenLabs, or telephony in general
  • Side projects we can look at

None of these are requirements. If you match the list above and none of this one, still apply.

What you get back

  • NZ$84,000 a year
  • Hybrid by design: 2 to 3 days in the Eden Terrace office, the rest from home
  • Current tooling, paid for. We back your AI use rather than rationing it
  • Work that ships: real systems in front of real users, not prototypes
  • Real ownership: you shape the development strategy alongside the founder, and what you ship is yours to run

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