GenAI Lead Consultant

JobSpace; Tauranga; Hybrid; NZD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working model (min 2 days in-­-

Fully subsidised medical insurance

Parental leaveTop-up

Staff Assistance Programme

Flexibility and inclusive culture

Job summary

Theta is seeking a senior leader to head its Generative AI Centre of Excellence in New Zealand. You will ship AI systems for top NZ organisations, set the engineering standards, and remain hands-on across the stack.

You will design proofs of concept, craft the harness, and drive end-to-end loops from planning through verification and repair. You will act as the senior technical voice for clients, shape approaches, assess feasibility, cost and risk, and uplift Theta developers through coaching

Qualifications

• Experience leading AI projects and delivering production-grade AI systems.
• Proven ability to work with clients, stakeholders and teams across multiple disciplines.
• Hands-on coding and architecture work with agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver proofs of concept and early-stage builds with agentic systems.
• Engineer the model harness: tool definitions, context, routing, and observability.
• Lead and mentor engineers; drive quality, cost and delivery for client projects.
• Establish standards, patterns and guardrails for the AI Centre of Excellence.

Skills

Python

C#/.NET

TypeScript

Technical leadership

AI coding agents

Design AI systems

Tools

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Azure AI Foundry

Copilot Studio

Job description

Jora New Zealand will close on 9th September 2026. Thank you for being with us, we are cheering you on as you continue your career journey.

Theta's Generative Ai Centre Of Excellence Lead

You have spent the past year building with AI agents - not experimenting with them, but genuinely changing how you work. This role makes that the job.

You will lead Theta's Generative AI Centre of Excellence: shipping AI systems for some of New Zealand's best-known organisations, setting the practice our engineers build by, and staying hands-on in the code throughout. It is a lead role that does not take you away from building.

Most AI projects die somewhere between the impressive demo and production. Closing that gap is the work - harness design, loop engineering, and evaluation you can actually trust.

• Design and deliver proofs of concept and early-stage builds that put agentic systems in front of real users and real data, fast enough to learn something - working AI-first yourself, with coding agents across the whole lifecycle.
• Design the harness around the model - tool definitions, context management, permissions, routing, approval gates, observability. This is what determines reliability, not the prompt.
• Engineer the loops. Build systems that plan, act, verify and repair on their own, with termination conditions that produce evidence rather than an agent's own assurance that it is finished.

Act as the senior technical voice for clients adopting generative AI - shaping approach, challenging assumptions, and giving straight advice about feasibility, cost and risk.

Design and run the capability uplift for Theta's developers: workshops, coaching, pairing and reference implementations that turn one-off enthusiasm into consistent practice.

Establish the standards, patterns and guardrails the Centre of Excellence puts its name to, including responsible AI, privacy and security practice.

Design and ship internal systems that make Theta measurably better at what it does, treating our own business as the proving ground for practice we later take to clients - and turning what works into accelerators and tooling the wider organisation can pick up.

Keep a deliberate eye on the field as it moves, and make considered calls about what is worth adopting, what is worth watching, and what is noise.

• Typically 8+ years building and shipping production software, with a track record of technical leadership on complex work.
• At least 12 months of sustained, hands-on development using an agentic coding tool - Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or a close equivalent - as a core part of how you work rather than an occasional experiment.
• Experience applying AI coding agents across the full software lifecycle - design, implementation, testing and deployment - with evaluation at every stage rather than only at test time: designing eval suites, defining "done" so a system can verify it, and diagnosing why an agent went wrong.
• Hands-on experience building agentic systems as the deliverable for clients, not only as a way of working.
• Strong coding ability in Python, C#/.NET or TypeScript, and the range to work across the stack.
• Proven consulting and teaching ability - running discovery, managing senior stakeholders, telling a client when something should not be built, and making what you know intuitively learnable by someone who does not.

Nice To Have

• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) - building and deploying agents on the Microsoft stack.
• Working depth in Azure and its AI services (AWS equally welcome), and sound judgement about risk, privacy and responsible AI.
• Experience across the wider Microsoft data platform - Fabric, Synapse, Power BI, Power Platform or Dynamics 365.
• Familiarity with the New Zealand context - the Privacy Act 2020, NZISM, public sector assurance, and Māori data sovereignty principles.
• Experience establishing a practice or centre of excellence from an early stage.

We have 30 years of experience as a New Zealand-owned technology consultancy. We take pride in our multicultural and diverse team of circa 290+ skilled professionals. Our offices are in Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch.

Working with clients in both the public and private sectors, we strive to deliver innovative solutions and enable smarter outcomes. Our company attracts some of the brightest minds in the industry, as we foster a culture of excellence and continuous learning.

Our values are:

• Our people are our greatest asset.
• We conduct business ethically.
• Invention, imagination and creativity are the foundation for growth.
• We work with positive energy, enjoyment, humour and work/life balance.
• Excellence is our passion and we deliver what we promise - or more!
• We strive to take a pragmatic approach to all of our activities
• We value and appreciate our natural environment and seek to play our part to maintain it

Theta offers a family friendly work environment with flexible work hours where practical; especially relevant for caregivers. We embrace gender equality and are committed to providing a supportive, diverse and inclusive work environment.

Theta is committed to giving back to the community and are avid supporters of Cure Kids. We compete in various adventure races and do many other things to raise money for Cure Kids. And we make time for the fun things in life!

We currently provide the following benefits to ensure your professional development and personal wellbeing:

• Professional growth and learning opportunities
• A competitive salary (commensurate with experience)
• Hybrid working model (from a minimum of 2 days in the office)
• Fully subsidised medical insurance for employees
• Heavily discounted medical insurance for immediate family of employees
• Enhanced parental leave payment - salary top-ups plus return-to-work incentive
• Internal Referral Incentive
• Staff Assistance Programme
• Sick leave from your first day on board
• Remote working options where practical and mutually agreed
• Daily fresh fruit basket, coffee machine, wide selection of teas and biscuits in all of our offices.
• We are also an accredited employer with INZ

Please note: Potential employees will be required to consent to a Ministry of Justice and Credit Check

Note : We are only accepting applications from those already residing in NZ with relevant visas