Principal Generative AI Engineer — Lead AI CoE

Tribe Group; Auckland; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Tribe Group, in partnership with a leading New Zealand owned tech consultancy, seeks a Principal Generative AI Engineer to establish and lead a Generative AI Centre of Excellence. You will be hands-on and steer practical delivery of AI systems used by real users.

You’ll work across client delivery, internal enablement, and set guardrails on responsible AI, privacy and security while mentoring engineers and shaping standards across the practice.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and shipping production software with technical leadership on complex delivery
• 12+ months of hands-on development using an agentic coding tool as a core part of building
• End-to-end experience applying AI agents across design, implementation, testing and deployment
• Hands-on experience building agentic systems as the deliverable
• Strong coding ability in Python, C#/.NET or TypeScript across the stack
• Confident consulting and teaching capability: discovery, stakeholder management, and coaching engineers to uplift skills

Responsibilities

• Lead the Generative AI Centre of Excellence and stay hands-on in code
• Deliver client projects from proofs of concept through early builds
• Enable the team via workshops, pairing and reference implementations
• Set standards and guardrails around responsible AI, privacy and security
• Coach and uplift engineers across the practice

Skills

Technical leadership

Python

C#/.NET

TypeScript

AI agents

Hands-on coding

End-to-end AI

Tools

GitHub Copilot

Claude Code

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Azure AI

Fabric / Synapse

Job description

Tribe Group, in partnership with a leading New Zealand owned tech consultancy, seeks a Principal Generative AI Engineer to establish and lead a Generative AI Centre of Excellence. You will be hands-on and steer practical delivery of AI systems used by real users.

You’ll work across client delivery, internal enablement, and set guardrails on responsible AI, privacy and security while mentoring engineers and shaping standards across the practice.