Senior Principal Engineer - Applied AI

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world's leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There's an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change.

With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, and China, we are thrilled to be expanding our global footprint, landing our new hub in Bengaluru, India. With rapid a growth plan in place for India, we're hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

We're building the core agentic capabilities in-house, transitioning from a POC phase to production-ready systems with full internal ownership.

We are looking for talent in Seattle or West Coast US to align with NZ timezones.

Requirements

Join as the technical leader of Serko's AI engineering team. You'll work as a trio with the Product Manager and Senior Engineering Manager to shape the product's technical direction, establish engineering practice, and amplify the team's impact. This isn't just a senior IC role—you'll define how we build production agentic systems, mentor engineers, and ensure we deliver an experience our customers will love.

Make an Impact

Technical Leadership & Architecture
Lead the design and delivery of agentic AI systems—defining multi-agent patterns, state management, and integrations with Platform APIs. Shape technical direction, write high-quality production code, and drive architectural consistency across teams.

Standards, Practices & Quality
Establish best practices for prompt engineering, agent evaluation, testing, and reliability. Improve and extend Serko’s engineering frameworks, define SLOs and observability for agentic systems, and ensure secure, responsible AI practices.

Data-Driven Engineering
Use metrics on latency, cost, reliability, and agent outcomes to guide technical decisions. Build observability and evaluation frameworks that connect system performance to customer value.

Mentorship & Team Development
Coach engineers in system design, agentic patterns, and technical leadership. Build team capability through reviews, pairing, documentation, and fostering a culture of learning and experimentation.

Collaboration & Influence
Partner with PMs and Engineering Managers to shape the roadmap and ensure technical feasibility. Work across Platform, Full-Stack, and NZ-based teams to align on architecture and unblock delivery. Contribute to Serko’s wider AI engineering practices and share patterns that lift company capability.

What you will bring

• 8+ years full-stack engineering, including 2+ years at Staff+ level and 2+ years building production AI systems using OpenAI/Anthropic or similar foundation models.

• Experience designing and shipping multi-agent systems with strong understanding of agentic patterns (plan/execute, self-reflection, orchestration).
• Architectural leadership across complex, cross-functional systems; able to set patterns, make trade-offs, and influence adoption.
• Strong cloud engineering skills (Azure/AWS/GCP) and experience designing reliable, scalable agentic systems.
• Hands-on expertise with LLM evaluation, safety, groundedness, regression testing, and controlled rollouts.
• Deep experience operating LLMs in production: prompting at scale, retries/fallbacks, observability, SLOs, error handling, latency/cost optimisation.
• Data-driven decision-making using engineering metrics to guide optimisation and technical priorities.
• Strong foundation in Python or Node.js with a track record of clean, maintainable, production-ready code.
• Experience mentoring engineers, shaping technical culture, and providing architectural direction.
• Strong strategic thinking—comfortable with ambiguity, risk management, estimation, and cross-team alignment.
• Understanding of responsible AI practices, including bias mitigation, transparency, and ethical considerations.

Valuable

• RAG/retrieval experience (vector DBs, chunking, hybrid search, reranking).
• Experience with large-scale API integrations and robust error-handling patterns.
• Familiarity with travel, multi-step booking systems, or complex B2B transactional workflows.
• Experience working with security teams on secure system de