Expressions of Interest - 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, 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 - this is a expressions of interest at this stage with hiring picking pace mid March onwards.

Requirements

Join as the technical expert of Serko's AI engineering team. You’ll write production-worthy code, own architecture decisions, mentor other engineers, and collaborate with stakeholders across the US West Coast and New Zealand time zones. You’ll have meaningful autonomy—to define both what we build and how we build it.

Make an Impact
This role will focus on designing, building, and deploying scalable machine learning models, delivering outcomes that drastically reduce friction for business travelers—from predictive expense categorization to highly personalized booking recommendations.

• Architect & Build: Define our agentic architecture—including multi-agent orchestration, state management, and API integrations. You will lead by example, writing clean, high-leverage production code.
• Set the AI Standard: Pioneer best practices for prompt engineering, agent evaluation, and observability. You will own the metrics that matter (latency, token usage, task success) and ensure our systems are reliable and secure.
• Champion Responsible AI: Work closely with security teams to ensure data protection, ethical AI use, and bias mitigation across all LLM interactions.
• Elevate the Engineering Craft: Mentor and coach engineers across all levels, helping them navigate the ambiguity of the evolving AI ecosystem and connecting technical work to customer value.
• Drive Strategic Alignment: Partner with Product and Engineering leadership (the "Trio") to shape the roadmap, making pragmatic trade-offs between velocity, complexity, and long-term maintainability.
• Influence at Scale: Navigate cross-functional dependencies across global teams (including NZ stakeholders) and act as a key contributor to Serko’s overall AI engineering maturity.

What you will bring

• Taking machine learning models through the entire lifecycle, from exploratory data analysis and prototyping to production deployment and monitoring.
• Working within cross-functional agile teams to deliver AI features that directly impact user experience and business metrics.
• Applying MLOps best practices, including CI/CD for machine learning, model versioning, and automated testing.
• Communicating complex data concepts and model outcomes clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

(Technical Skills)

• Strong proficiency in programming languages such as Python and SQL.
• Hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks and libraries (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn, XGBoost).
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and their native machine learning ecosystems (e.g., SageMaker, Azure ML).
• Familiarity with big data processing tools and modern data stack environments (e.g., Databricks, PySpark, Snowflake, or BigQuery).

Benefits

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. We are committed to building an environment where our people are engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.

• Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:
• A competitive base pay
• Medical Benefits
• Discretionary incentive plan based on individual and company performance
• Focus on development: Access to a learning & development platform and opportunity for you to own your career pathways
• Flexible work policy.
  

Apply

Hit the ‘apply' button now, or explore more about what it's like to work at Serko and all our global opportunities at .