Platform Lead - AI Operations

Worker Type:

Permanent

Here at BNZ, it's about more than just banking. We work together in an agile, energising environment to create innovative solutions through our promise "If you can imagine a better future, let's find a way."

We support wellbeing, flexible working and have a generous leave offering. There is the opportunity for growth, learning and career development. No two days are the same.

Join the AI team building our capability across BNZ.

As Platform Lead - AI Operations, you’ll play a pivotal role in progressing the operational backbone that allows AI solutions to scale safely, transparently, and responsibly. This is not about running a single tool or supporting individual teams - it’s about creating the platform services that give the organisation confidence in how AI behaves in production.

This role helps ensure AI is operated with confidence, consistency, and rigour at scale. Your platform will provide the observability, evaluation, cost visibility, and operational governance that allows dozens of AI solutions — built across low-code and high-code platforms - to run with the same rigour we expect of any critical business system.

Mō te Tūranga \| About the Role

We sat down with our Head of Technology – Artificial Intelligence, who shared the following about the role.

What are some of the responsibilities for this role?

Own and operate BNZ’s AI Operations platform : Define, build, and run the AI Operations platform as a managed service, enabling domain teams to observe, monitor, and optimise AI solutions in production.

Provide end-to-end observability for AI solutions : Provide unified tracing across AI workflows — from user input through orchestration and model response — regardless of where solutions are deployed.

Define evaluation and quality standards for AI : Design evaluation frameworks and guardrails that assess quality, safety, and reliability before release and continuously monitor behaviour in production.

Provide cost transparency and accountability : Own AI operational visibility, giving domain teams clear insight into usage, trends, and budget impacts, integrated with finance processes.

Maintain the agent registry : Provide transparency on the agentic workloads running across the enterprise.

Integrate across AI build platforms : Work with other platform leads to define standards so all solutions emit the telemetry and metadata required for operations.

Define operational maturity and incident response : Establish playbooks, alerting, and escalation for AI incidents, ensuring solutions are operated with enterprise-grade discipline.

What projects / mahi (work) will the candidate be working on now and into the next year?

In the near term, you will focus on delivering and evolving BNZ’s AI Operations platform, ensuring AI solutions across the organisation are observable, evaluated, cost-transparent, and governed to enterprise standards.

Over the next year, the role will centre on scaling and strengthening this capability — embedding evaluation into delivery pipelines, integrating cost accountability into business-as-usual processes, refining operational guardrails, and supporting a growing portfolio of AI solutions across multiple domains and platforms.

What is the most exciting thing about this opportunity?

This is a fast-paced opportunity with real momentum behind it. There’s strong organisational support allowing you to work at the cutting edge of agentic AI. You’ll be part of a phenomenal team and gain exposure to diverse teams and use cases across BNZ, shaping how AI is delivered safely and effectively at enterprise scale.

What is the most challenging thing about this opportunity?

The biggest challenge is the pace of change in the agentic AI space. The technology, patterns, and best practices are evolving rapidly, requiring you to stay current while still delivering meaningful progress in the here and now.

It also means continually challenging your own assumptions - making informed decisions based on what is known today, while accepting that those decisions may need to be revisited as the landscape shifts.

What will success look like for the candidate in this role?

Success looks like owning the outcomes for BNZ’s AI Operations platform and the organisation’s Agentic practice - setting clear standards for how LLMs are designed, evaluated, operated, and governed in production.

You will build strong relationships with engineers, architects, vendors, and business teams to shape best practice across prompt design, evaluation, guard railing, and operational use of LLMs, while remaining deeply technical and hands-on where it matters most.

What specific tech skills would be beneficial?

We are looking for an experienced Platform Owner (or similar role) with an excellent understanding of software development processes and platform architecture. Alongside this you will bring experience in:

Creating, prioritising, and managing a product backlog effectively.

Using data and KPIs to inform prioritisation and product decisions.

Deep cloud + container runtime services, and operating production-grade platforms that other teams depend on.

Networking and connectivity patterns for secure service-to-service communication and access to enterprise services/operational tooling.

Standardising enterprise integration patterns for agents connecting to data, APIs, and services (balance DX with security/ops control).

Security, governance, and operational guardrails for scaling agentic / LLM workloads safely in an enterprise environment.

Strong LLM/LLM-Ops capability, including prompt and chain/workflow design, evaluation strategies, guard railing patterns, and production operations — with the credibility to lead and evolve BNZ’s LLM practice.

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Nau Mai ki te Pēke o Aotearoa \| Come to the Bank of New Zealand

Please note applications close Sunday 22 March 2026.

This is an exciting opportunity to join us! We're bold thinkers who are taking brave steps to create a company that people want to work for, and customers want to bank with. If you're ready to join a fun organisation where we are proud of our culture and how we are helping New Zealander's to 'Find their way', then show your interest by submitting your application - we can't wait to read it.

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini" - Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many.”

Closing Date: 22 March 2026

Applications will be reviewed regularly across the advertising period, but we do reserve the right to close applications early.