Principal Engineer - Serko.ai

Serko Limited; Auckland; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

KiwiSaver matching

Health insurance

Learning & development

Job summary

Serko Limited is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Serko.ai Experience department. You will own system-level scope, mentor engineers, and lead cross-department migrations while aligning engineering with business strategy.

Bring deep full-stack skills, AI fluency, and a track record of autonomous leadership to drive major initiatives across time zones and pods.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in modern frontend and backend tech stacks.
• Experience shaping architecture across multiple pods or teams.
• Comfort integrating AI capabilities into products.

Responsibilities

• Make day-to-day architectural calls and solve cross-cutting infrastructure challenges to strengthen the foundations every pod builds on.
• Partner early on solution design, set shared quality standards, and mentor staff/senior engineers.
• Evaluate and integrate AI capabilities ensuring safe, scalable adoption across product surface.
• Lead cross-department service handovers and integrations.
• Represent Serko.ai Experience in executive planning and roadmapping.

Skills

Next.js/React

TypeScript

Python or Node

AI fluency

Leadership

Architectural decisions

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

CI/CD

Dev environments

Job description

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, and 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 a rapid growth plan in place, we're hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.
As a Principal Engineer in the Serko.ai Experience department, you are a key technical leader across every pod. You're trusted with high autonomy to own major initiatives end-to-end and make the daily technical calls that keep teams shipping fast. You tackle the complex, system-level challenges that span beyond a single pod—proactively resolving gaps in our shared architecture, shaping solution design, and bringing clarity to our hardest engineering problems.

You work alongside fellow Principal Engineers and our Senior Principal Engineer, so that several major initiatives can move in parallel. You set a high technical bar, leading by example through the work you do and staying hands-on enough to unblock others — shaping solutions early, guiding technical choices, and reviewing what gets built, so pods can take real ownership of their delivery.

What you'll do

• Own System-Level Scope: Make day-to-day architectural calls and solve cross-cutting infrastructure challenges to strengthen the foundations every pod builds on.

• Elevate Engineering Craft: Partner early on solution design, set shared quality standards, and mentor Staff/Senior Engineers so teams move fast without compromising quality.
• Lead Agentic AI Adoption: Evaluate and integrate emerging AI capabilities, ensuring responsible, safe, and scalable implementation across our growing product surface.
• Coordinate Strategic Migrations: Lead cross-department service handovers and integrations, aligning engineering efforts across time zones and business units.
• Connect Tech to Business Strategy: Represent Serko.ai Experience in executive planning and roadmapping, ensuring engineering decisions support the bigger picture.

What you'll bring

• End-to-End Ownership & Autonomous Leadership: Proven track record leading major technical initiatives, resolving cross-team dependencies across time zones, and making high-trust architectural decisions that keep teams moving fast.

• Modern Full-Stack & Front-End Craft: Deep technical strength in Next.js/React, TypeScript, and Python or Node, with a sharp eye for building accessible, high-craft, customer-facing applications.
• AI & Agentic Fluency: Solid understanding of AI and agentic capabilities—ensuring safe, scalable product adoption while actively using AI-assisted tools to multiply throughput for yourself and surrounding engineers.
• Systems Infrastructure & Platform Integration: Experience integrating shared platform services into live products and strengthening core developer infrastructure (CI/CD, test automation, dev environments) to elevate department-wide reliability and speed.
• Collaborative Leadership & Mentorship: Exceptional communication skills with a history of mentoring across multiple teams, co-leading initiatives alongside peer Principals, and guiding solution design without taking over team ownership.

At Serko we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work. This means you'll be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high-quality, and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.

Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:

• A competitive base salary
• KiwiSaver covered with employee contributions match up to 3.5% of salary, and life insurance.
• Health & Wellbeing: Discounted Southern Cross Health Insurance, access to confidential support, guidance and counselling services, wellbeing and voluntary leave, and free flu shots.
• Focus on development: Access to a learning & development platform, committed budget and opportunity for you to own your career pathways.