AI Ops Engineer

One New Zealand; Christchurch; Hybrid; NZD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading telecommunications company in Christchurch is seeking an AI Ops Engineer to manage AI service observability, ensuring clear operational signals and effective governance. The role involves close collaboration with various teams to implement toxic guardrails and maintain operational documentation. The ideal candidate will have experience in AI service management and a collaborative approach. This position offers flexibility, health insurance, and opportunities for work-life balance.

Benefits

Flexible work hours

Fully subsidised health insurance

Laptop and unlimited data plan

Lifestyle leave options

Discounts on company products

Qualifications

• Proven experience in AI service management and observability.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with multiple teams.
• Understanding of governance and safety in AI operations.
• Familiarity with version control and audit trails.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end observability across AI services.
• Define and implement guardrails for AI services.
• Align support structures and ensure operational readiness.
• Collaborate on feature retrieval patterns.
• Enforce product-level cost tracking and drive optimizations.
• Maintain operational documentation.

Skills

AI service management

Collaboration with engineering teams

Toxicity guardrails implementation

Experience with DataOps

Job description

At One NZ we’re not just imagining the future, we’re building it. Our purpose? A better-connected Aotearoa New Zealand. Kia renarena te taukaea i Aotearoa New Zealand. Our ambition? To become the most AI-enabled telco on the planet. This isn’t just about our technology, It’s about you. We’re investing in our people like never before... empowering them to grow, lead, and shape what’s next. Through our AI School, access to world-class learning platforms, or career pathways that evolve with you, we create an environment where your curiosity thrives, and your skills accelerate. Join us and be part of something extraordinary: connect with purpose and help redefine what’s possible. Uia mai koe te pātai, he aha te mea nui o tēnei ao? Māku koe e ki atu he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. “If you asked me, what is the greatest thing in this world, I would say it is people, it is people, it is people.”

Ko tō tūranga – your role

As the AI Ops Engineer in Data & AI, you’ll lead the enablement of end-to-end observability across AI services — embedding dashboards, alerts, traces, and evaluation reports to ensure every change is evidence-based and every service has clear operational signals. You’ll own the AI lifecycle gates from evaluation through rollout, rollback, drift detection, and deprecation, managing models and configurations as code with versioning, test coverage, and audit trails.

You’ll work closely with Support, Service Management, Platform Engineering, SRE, DataOps, Security, Architecture, and product owners to align criticality tiers, SLOs, and support structures that balance customer experience with cost. You’ll also partner with engineering and DataOps on feature stores, retrieval patterns, lineage, and FinOps controls to ensure scalable, predictable AI operations.

This role operates through influence and hands-on enablement — publishing clear patterns, coaching squads and partners, and keeping the flow from inception to production simple, visible, and auditable.

Ko Tō Mahi – What You’ll Do

• Lead the evaluation, approval, rollout, rollback, drift detection, and deprecation of AI services. Manage models and configurations as code with versioning, test coverage, and audit trails.
• Define and implement guardrails for toxicity, PII, policy violations, hallucination control, and grounding. Conduct red-teaming exercises and containment strategies, and report on safety posture.
• Align support structures, on-call coverage, escalation paths, and playbooks with Service Management and partners. Ensure runbooks are current, usable, and effective for BAU and after-hours support.
• Collaborate with DataOps on feature and embedding stores, retrieval/RAG patterns, lineage, and SLAs to ensure reliability and cost-efficiency.
• Enforce tagging to surface product-level costs, monitor budget variances and anomalies, and drive safe optimisations such as caching, batching, and model sizing.
• Maintain up-to-date standards, diagrams, evaluation reports, and runbooks to ensure clean handovers and reduce single points of failure.

Nā Mātou Te Rourou – What You’ll Get

• One New Zealand is leading the way by ensuring you can have a truly balanced life. Most roles allow flexibility to work from home and flex your hours to enjoy work & whānau commitments.
• A fully subsidised Southern Cross health insurance cover for you and your family.
• Laptop, unlimited data plan and a market leading mobile phone
• Lifestyle leave, giving you the option to purchase an extra week or two of annual leave.
• Discounts on One New Zealand products, services and much more!

Joining our whānau is more than starting a new job - it’s the beginning of a journey that will challenge and inspire you to play a role in something bigger. Tū hikitia rā, tū hāpainga. Tū hāpainga, tū hikitia rā. We stand to uplift, to support and to elevate others.