AI Application Engineer

Company Description

WM New Zealand is New Zealand's leading resource recovery, recycling, and waste management provider. We’re committed to safeguarding our beautiful environment through sustainable management of our valuable resources. Put simply, sustainability is what we do.

Job Description

An opportunity has arisen for an AI applications engineer to join our team building next-generation AI solutions. The role combines hands-on development of LLM-powered applications & workflows with the chance to work across diverse AI technologies and frameworks.

The position involves developing production AI systems using modern frameworks, building intelligent applications that solve real business problems, and contributing to the evolution of our AI platform architecture.

Key responsibilities include:

• Transform ideas into AI solutions: Work with product teams & business stakeholders to understand business challenges and design LLM-powered applications or AI/ML applications that deliver measurable impact
• Own the full stack: Develop and optimize AI applications from model integration through deployment, including prompt engineering, model selection, and containerization.
• Create proof-of-concepts: Rapidly prototype new AI capabilities, evaluate emerging models, and recommend technical approaches
• Optimize AI performance: Improve response quality, reduce latency, and manage costs through smart caching, prompt optimization, and model selection
• Collaborate on AI safety: Implement guardrails, content filtering, and evaluation metrics to ensure responsible AI deployment

Qualifications

• 3-5 years software engineering experience, with recent focus on LLM applications and AI agents
• Strong Python skills, comfortable with TypeScript/JavaScript, async patterns, and API development
• Experience building RAG systems: retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and hybrid search approaches
• Hands-on experience developing AI agents with tool-use, planning, and reasoning capabilities & familiarity with emerging agent frameworks (LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI) and protocols like MCP
• Applied knowledge of prompt engineering techniques and evaluation methods for LLM systems
• Practical experience with cloud AI platforms (Azure AI, AWS Bedrock, or Vertex AI)
• Understanding of containerization and deployment strategies for AI applications
• Interest in multi-agent systems and staying current with rapidly evolving AI engineering practices

Additional Information

What we offer:

• Competitive Salary Package
• Valid and rewarding career path
• Work Life Balance Initiatives
• Professional Development Opportunities
• Onsite Café and Carpark
• Discounts on various products for you and your family to enjoy
• Discounts on Fuel at Z!

To apply for this role click “I'm interested”

Please note - we do not always work to fixed closing dates and may start considering applications as they are received so we encourage you to apply early.

WM is an EEO employer and promotes drug and alcohol-free workplaces.

You must be in New Zealand and hold a current work visa / residency or NZ citizenship.